What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive]

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Zevox

2024-02-26, 07:39 PM

I'm in kind of a weird spot with Dragon's Dogma 2. I really liked the first game when it came out, but the combination of the difficulty I had getting back into it when I tried to replay it last year and the general sense that the trailers for 2 look excessively same-y to the first has me hesitant about it now. When it was first announced I was sure I'd get it day 1; now I'm in wait and see mode with it. See what people think once it's out, check out some gameplay videos of people actually playing it, etc, then decide if I want it.

Rynjin

2024-02-26, 07:44 PM

Understandable. Personally I'm in the boat of "the issue with Dragon's Dogma was lacking CONTENT not lacking GAMEPLAY so just adding more monsters to fight and quests to do will suffice".

DaedalusMkV

2024-02-26, 11:02 PM

I've been playing a fair bit of Helldivers 2 recently. Excellent game to play with your friends. Alone it's a reasonably enjoyable experience, but with a squad it gets to be some of the best fun I've had with a shooter in a long time. Spreading Freedom and Managed Democracy to the benighted corners of the galaxy? Pretty good times. While I've personally only dipped my toes in as far as difficulty 5, which is roughly in the middle of the difficulty set, it's already all kinds of chaotic when the game decides it's time for danger. Some standout moments include an assault on an Automaton stronghold with two large Assembler complexes, an anti-aircraft battery and an artillery battery which saw my team bogged down by endless waves of reinforcements both from robot dropships and the factories themselves while unable to call in our most important airstrikes in response. Fifteen minutes we fought and bled to push our way through to the AA guns, bring them down and then smash the main factory complex... Only for the bots to respond with a pinpoint artillery strike that killed two of our brave Helldivers who were in the process of trying to take down a tank with heavy infantry support. With our reinforcement budget depleted and another wave of bot drops incoming, the survivor grabbed all the samples she could from the heroic fallen warriors and retreated to the pickup point to fight another day. Total casualty count? 14 Helldivers and some 1100 mechanical socialists, plus most of a square kilometer of terrain. Or that time against the bugs the game decided that 5 Chargers needed to come at us from every direction all at the same time immediately after we engaged a massive nest complex completely full of every variety of bug. That one ended in a glorious victory, as freedom rained from the sky and our recoilless rifle scored one telling blow after another to peel off the bugs chitinous armour.

If you're at all interested in squad-based cooperative third-person horde shooters, I strongly recommend you give the game a look. Soon enough you too could be diving into utmost danger for Super Earth!

Rynjin

2024-02-27, 01:08 AM

Helldivers 2 is super fun, and will be even moreso when they get a few of the kinks worked out (like armor not working properly).

warty goblin

2024-02-27, 10:29 AM

My march through King Arthur: Knight's Tale continues. I'm into Chapter 2 now, and the combat remains as satisfying as ever. It's mostly built around your four (sometimes five) person party against lots of enemies, and is still very weighted towards melee combat using absolute tanks. You also have a couple very useful melee support and ranged classes, but you really need the steel wall of a couple heavy armor guys to have a chance. This isn't D&D where armor is an aesthetic choice about how to avoid damage. Here, you just plain need armor, because otherwise a couple skeleton knights with two handed maces are going to pulverize you.

The major enemy in chapter 2 is the Picts, who are substantially harder than the various undead in chapter 1. They've got some better units, including a very annoying shock infantry dude who can make himself immune to damage for a round, and so doesn't care about melee overwatch, but mostly it's that they seem to be much better at focusing fire. The undead never did that, but the Picts have a disconcerting habit of choosing a squishier guy and hammering him. This is the sort of little AI detail that I really love, because it presents a distinct challenge, and absolutely fits with the fiction.

Cespenar

2024-02-27, 11:17 AM

King Arthur was pretty slept on IMO. Nice to see it being enjoyed.

I myself am trying a roguelike-roguelike called Rift Wizard. Just old school roguelike levels, and hundreds of D&D-like spells to combo and rain hell upon the monsters. Pretty tactical and fun. And hard too.

Form

2024-02-27, 12:00 PM

I kind of want to give Helldivers 2 a try, but I don't think enough people in my friend group would be willing to play it and it doesn't look anywhere near as much fun with a bunch of randos. I also thought the game still has some issues with connectivity.

Actana

2024-02-27, 12:01 PM

King Arthur was a fun time, especially once you got some of the more unique pieces of gear that modified your abilities in some ways. Overwatch archers can become absolute menaces, and the final form of Mordred was a blast in what I can only call "Mordred Pinball", where your damage rises each Shield Charge you do, and every kill you make refunds cooldown and AP. Line enemies up in low to high HP and knock them all down in a single turn.

And the game is getting an Undead Roman Legion DLC soon too, which looks exciting. Not just facing a new faction, but playing as the undead Romans.

Jophiel

2024-02-27, 12:56 PM

I haven't had any connection issues for a while and walked right into each game over the weekend (versus the previous forever-queues) but I do agree it's best played with friends you can coordinate with or enjoy some chaos from. Rando games are often perfectly good but almost no one uses voice and it's not the same vibe.

Zombimode

2024-02-27, 01:48 PM

I started with Spellforce 3 last weekend and I am now well into the campaign. And I continue to be pleasantly surprised and impressed by this game. I have enjoyed the series so far but none of its entries has truly amazed by so far*. Also, there is usually a benefit of playing a game in your native language when the game was written in that language. Until now this benefit has not been materialized because the writing and voice-acting had been consistently lackluster.

Things that surprised me in Spellforce 3:

As mentioned, the writing is actually good. The voice-acting as well. The male protagonist especially is superb. One of the best performances for me in a very long time.
The nuanced portrayal of characters. Not just the companions, but literally everyone, not matter how small the role, has something going on for them. There is always some nuance and complexity in motivations and emotions. You wont find cackling evil overlords, nor walking cliches, nor anything loud and obnoxious, no comic relieve. The characters, and with them the world, have a very... I don't know... grounded feel to them.
Bioware/Obsidian style companions. Including their participation in dialogues and impact on encounters/quests.
The contextualization of stuff. Things don't just exist. You don't just encounter undead on a map. For some many things there is context given in some way or the other. Often it is not much, maybe just a short comment by one of the companions. But enough to give things purpose. And it feeds into the grounded feeling of the world.

The weak points mostly lie in the gameplay. The divide between the RPG parts and the RTS parts are quite strict (compared to the previous titles). While I think controlling your adventuring party is much improved compared to Spellforce 1 and 2, so far I'm not getting the hang of the RTS gameplay. My usual strategy is to (ab)use the ultimate win condition: destroying the enemy headquarter which instantly kills and destroys all remaining enemy units and buildings.

As a bonus: I like that we are more or less playing the origin stories for the Circle Mages. I don't think I will gather all 13 of the later Circle Mages, but all companions so far will become Circle Mages in the future.

* I skipped Faith in Destiny and Demons of the Past because of the rather negative reviews these late-coming DLCs got.

DaedalusMkV

2024-02-27, 01:57 PM

The connectivity issues are pretty much fixed at this point as far as I can tell. I haven't seen the queues in a week or so now, and the devs announced they now have the capacity to handle something close to the absolute peak players they experienced trying to log in on Friday evening on the bonus XP weekend. So I wouldn't worry too much about not being able to play the game at all at this point.

As for friends, yeah that's fair. The game is perfectly playable solo, but it's definitely much more fun the more people you have. 2 players is solid fun, 3 players is excellent and 4 players is an absolute blast. I've been doing most of my play with a squad of 2-3 and having a great time. I'd say if you have 1-2 people you can probably recruit to play with it's worth looking at. If you don't have any friends who will play with you, or just one guy who's notoriously flaky, then you're probably better off passing on it.

BloodSquirrel

2024-02-27, 02:12 PM

One of the things that I think keeps tripping up choice and consequence in games is the idea that your choices matter means they drastically impact the plot. I much prefer to see choices as revealing character, which can be done with much less plot impact, arguably almost none at all. You can have the protagonist saves the world plot and all the same setpieces, but if the protagonist is a bitter jerk it'll feel very different than if they're a nice person, and all you need to alter is dialog.

One of the things that I realized looking back at Bioware's (de)volution is how much "choices matter" in an RPG is smoke and mirrors. And that's fine. It's an entertainment product. If the smoke and mirrors make you feel like you've made an important choice, you've made an important choice. Actual branching content is expensive, and you can't really branch beyond a few paths before it explodes exponentially. KotOR had almost no truly branching content beyond the dialog-tree scale. 99% of the choices in that game were addressed with a few lines of dialog. You'd decide the fate of something important on a planet, they'd tell you what the result was, then you'd leave the planet forever and the game never addressed it again. The ending was the exact same, just with a different cutscene.

And it worked. Even if my dark side choices only affected the game one minute into the future, the game did a good enough job of convincing me that I was participating in a story that the choices felt real. Dialog choices felt like they mattered, even if they didn't change the overall plotline. The game, well, it let you roleplay.

But then Bioware tried to "make your choices matter". It became a big thing. Instead of putting your choices in strategic places where they wouldn't require branching they were put front and center in the main plot. Instead of micro-scale choices that the game could give a convincing micro-scale response to they tried to give you BIG CHOICES. In the process of making choices more nominally consequential, the smoke blew away, the mirrors broke, and the artifice wound up being laid bare.

ME2 makes the problem really obvious right away: They can't deal with the choice they gave you at the end of ME1 without basically making two different games, so instead they just lock you out of the council. But the problem also creeps in more subtly. The dialog becomes too obviously railroaded. Instead of responses that acknowledge what you say, you get dialog options that don't say anything so that the character you're talking to can respond to all of them with the same thing.

WotR and Rogue Trader both do choice way, way better than ME even though the main plot stays more or less on the rails because they focus on giving you locally important choices that they can actually commit to.

Cygnia

2024-02-27, 02:30 PM

Speaking of Greedfall, Steam has Steelrising on sale for 65% off (from Spiders). Torn about picking it up or not...

warty goblin

2024-02-27, 04:05 PM

Spellforce 3 is indeed a good piece of work. I particularly liked the pacing. The writing is, as you say, quite good, but it's also efficient. A lot of RPGs seem like they're trying to drown me in lore and dialog and stuff, but SF3 manages about 90% of the depth at perhaps 50% of the word count.

I also really love the art direction. Its definitely more grounded than the low poly gonzo fantasy of the originals, but the density and detail of everything is great. The greater zoom level afforded by the RTS camera really pays off too, as it allows for bigger scenery and more complex environments than a lot of quasi-isometric RPGs.

Makes me want to get back to it. Maybe once I wrap up Kimg Arthur...

Speaking of Greedfall, Steam has Steelrising on sale for 65% off (from Spiders). Torn about picking it up or not...

SteelRising is quintessential Spiders. Janky, kinda innovative, and decidedly weird. Combat is pretty solid feeling, a bit faster moving than usual for a Soulsalike, and with a delightfully odd arsenal of chains and mechanical things. The narrative is pretty OK, nothing to write home about. As us usual for a Soulsalike, you can feel a bigger, richer game straining at the orthodoxy of the genre, though thanks to having actual difficulty settings like a civilized game* and Spiders' inherent weirdness, it gets somewhat farther afield than most.

I particularly enjoy the animations. Your hot French robot maid might look quite human, but she does not move like a human. This isn't so much the uncanny valley as the subject simply working differently, and the game not being utterly petrified of that inherent alienness.

*they call them accessibility settings, but they're difficulty settings. The key ones from my point of view are thr one that turns off dropping your XP when you die, and another that lets you tweak the stamina burn rate. Messing with bith of those gives you a delightfully normal action game, no corpse runs or standing around wheezing.

Zevox

2024-02-28, 05:33 PM

It was just announced today that Dragonball FighterZ's current-gen versions with rollback netcode, and the rollback update for the PC version, are coming out tomorrow. The same day as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

I am halfway between very excited and very upset. Goddamn whoever's bright idea it was to both release it then and not announce it until one day beforehand... :smallsigh:

At least the PS5 version is free for those who bought the PS4 version, that's great. I'll definitely be playing a lot of it, just not as much as I expected to initially because it's competing with probably the second biggest new release of the year for me.

Rynjin

2024-02-28, 05:47 PM

They...they hadn't added rollback to FighterZ yet? Didn't they say they were working on that like a year after the game came out? The game has been out for SIX YEARS!

Zevox

2024-02-28, 05:59 PM

They...they hadn't added rollback to FighterZ yet? Didn't they say they were working on that like a year after the game came out? The game has been out for SIX YEARS!
No, rollback didn't start to become common in fighting games until 2021, after the pandemic kind of forced them to realize how important it was to the online functioning properly. Before that it was mostly in indie fighting games, Killer Instinct, and a couple of Capcom games (though they didn't get it working great until SF6). DBFZ in particular was considered a long shot to get it since even though ArcSys are the developers and they've had fantastic rollback since 2021 that they were retrofitting into a lot of their older games, Bandai-Namco are the publishers and had to approve any money being spent on adding it to the game, and they're less than great about that kind of thing.

Nonetheless, they did finally announce it was being worked on in mid-2022. It's been repeatedly delayed since though, so they must have had some trouble making it work. They finally did a beta for it on the PC version late last year that reportedly went great though (I didn't participate since I have the PS4 version). So it's not especially surprising that it's coming out early this year, just sucks the specific day that they chose, and the decision to only tell us one day before it drops.

Cygnia

2024-02-28, 06:03 PM

"Cats Love Boxes" is out -- and somewhere, you'll find my two kittens in its gallery :smallredface:

Zevox

2024-02-29, 12:25 AM

Well, with DBFZ's update dropping, guess my time with Granblue Rising tonight is the last I'll be on it for a while. Got Cagliostro to S+ rank a few days ago, and started playing Vira after. I didn't get her there, instead hit my alternate goal of level 200, but I was on a solid winning streak at the end there tonight and shot up more than halfway there, which makes me wonder if I could get her to S+ if I kept playing tomorrow. Kind of hard to see myself doing so with both Rebirth and DBFZ Rollback coming out then though.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll be back to Granblue Rising in time, it's definitely very fun. And I feel like it's given me a new method of learning as I play these games, trying everyone because of how the ranked system applies a different rank to each character was working out great for me, and obviously finding a couple of characters I liked that I didn't expect to was great. I'll have to remember that for other fighting games that have that sort of ranked system. (Unfortunately DBFZ is not one of them; though it'd be hard to implement that in a team fighter anyway I suppose.)

LibraryOgre

2024-02-29, 01:23 PM

Last night, I picked up Stronghold (1993) again. It is so very fun.

So, it's based on D&D... likely Rules Cyclopedia, given the year (RC is 1991). You make your "Baron/Baroness" from one of the classes (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage, Dwarf, Elf, or Halfling), and up to four other characters. Each generates units of their type, with their stats, and you build buildings and improve your stronghold, building up an economy (and army) for when the monsters attack.

halfeye

2024-03-01, 07:49 AM

Last night, I picked up Stronghold (1993) again. It is so very fun.

Was this on the PC?

Cygnia

2024-03-01, 11:49 AM

Was this on the PC?

If they got it from Steam or GOG, then PC is an option...

LibraryOgre

2024-03-01, 01:21 PM

Was this on the PC?

...why would it be on anything else?

GloatingSwine

2024-03-01, 01:32 PM

Other videogame platforms did exist in 1993...

(Though for the removal of doubt this one's actually called D&D Stronghold not Stronghold. Stronghold is a different series.)

Errorname

2024-03-01, 02:47 PM

(Though for the removal of doubt this one's actually called D&D Stronghold not Stronghold. Stronghold is a different series.)

Yeah I was mildly confused by that at first, being only familiar with the more historical and non-D&D castle builder game called Stronghold.

Cygnia

2024-03-01, 03:48 PM

Still playing "Cats Love Boxes" and I found my cats in the gallery!

halfeye

2024-03-02, 07:19 AM

...why would it be on anything else?

At about that time I had an Atari STe, others had Amigae, both were better than contemporary PCs, and there were already consoles.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-02, 11:26 AM

Was this on the PC?

Other videogame platforms did exist in 1993...

(Though for the removal of doubt this one's actually called D&D Stronghold not Stronghold. Stronghold is a different series.)

Yeah I was mildly confused by that at first, being only familiar with the more historical and non-D&D castle builder game called Stronghold.

At about that time I had an Atari STe, others had Amigae, both were better than contemporary PCs, and there were already consoles.

I suppose a clearer version of the question is "Why would I be playing a PC game, clearly identified in the post by both its name and year of release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stronghold_%281993_video_game%29), and released only for DOS and two Japanese personal computer systems, on something other than a PC?"

Was I playing it on a system it was never released for? Maybe I was referring to a game that came out eight years later than the release date I specified? Maybe I should have used a name that gets used on a catalog, not the one I've been calling it for thirty years, that you see every time you boot up the game? Should I have been more specific than the first thing that pops up when you search "Stronghold 1993" on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Wikipedia?

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-02, 01:17 PM

Started another run of Rogue Trader, with an Imperial World Ecclissiarch Offider. It's working much better than my previous attempts at an Officer build, but I think that's because I nabbed as much Willpower as possible and decided to lean into AoE weapons (primarily shotguns and flamers).

No to bench Idira until the game finally lets me do what the Imperial Creed requests and get rid of the witch.

Zevox

2024-03-02, 06:21 PM

Been playing FF7 Rebirth for the past couple of days. It's quite good, as expected. Combat is FF7 Remake's but with more stuff added on, and some tweaks. Everyone now gets dodge attacks automatically, no need for the Deadly Dodge materia, for instance; and there's now a real parry mechanic where you hit block just before an attack would connecting with you and fully negate the damage, making blocking way more useful, so you're no longer necessarily just dodging as your defensive option of choice. Some characters movesets have had slight tweaks - Aerith's old special move, where she charges up and tosses a magic crystal attack at the opponent, is now done by holding her regular attack button, and her special move now teleports her instead, either a short distance in a direction you're holding to to a ward that she's set up. Red XIII joins your party pretty much right at the start of the game, and he's quite different, being built to encourage him to be a tank - he charges up a "revenge" mechanic by blocking and parrying, and when he activates revenge mode (which he can do at any time as long as he has some charge, the charge just determines its duration) he gets a big damage and speed buff. Which is kind of wasted on average enemies, but could make him an effective boss fighting character. There's also new team mechanics, Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities, where two characters do something together; the Skills are freebies you can use any time and come in offensive and defensive (usually counters) types, while the Synergy Abilities are ATB moves that are big and flashy and often provide a potent side-effect, but require characters to have used Synergy Skills enough first. For an example, Cloud and Barret have a Synergy Skill where Barret shoots bullets at Cloud, who then swats them at the enemy with his sword like it was a baseball bat; makes no sense whatsover if you think about it, granted, but it looks cool and works effectively to give Cloud a ranged attack he'd otherwise lack.

Writing remains good - although even with the solid writing quality the remake has had, it didn't do anything to make Sephiroth's turn from famous hero to omnicidal maniac any less abrupt, he still goes from zero to crazy and murderous in no time flat in that Nibelheim flashback. It's also a touch more open-worldy than I'd like. It doesn't seem as though it's going to be that bad in that regard, the areas are big but manageable, particularly once you have a Chocobo to ride, but some of the side-quests for Chadley are kind of fillery (Life Springs most notably). Amusingly enough when you ride a Chocobo, everybody else in your party also hops on one from nowhere, including Red XIII. Yep, this game has a dog riding a giant chicken, and it looks just as silly as you'd expect.

Surprisingly it's taking a little bit from Bioware's playbook - you get a dialogue wheel at times where you need to pick what Cloud says, and party members have a relationship stat with you that can go up from talking with them or using synergy skills for the first time. I'm assuming this is to facilitate the date event at the Golden Saucer eventually. Most people will probably aim for either Aerith or Tifa; me, I'm half thinking about going for a bromance with Barret. He's the best character in FF7 IMO, so why not?

Also, DBFZ on PS5 with rollback was just not working for the first couple of days (couldn't get matches, got disconnected from lobbies whenever I tried), but trying it today, seems like it is! Feels good so far, but oh boy, will it take some readjusting to. Been three years since I last played it, and it goes at a much more break-neck pace than Granblue Rising. Trying out Lab Coat 21 since she was added after I stopped playing, and she seems cool from the time I've spent with her in training mode and the little bit of play time I've given her. Need to figure out the team I want for her though.

halfeye

2024-03-04, 06:53 AM

Well, I didn't know the name, and it was easier to ask than mess with Wikipedia.

There were many multi-platform games at the time, most worse on PC than ST, and allegedly better still on Amiga. For example I was told that Dungeon Master had better stereo on the Amiga. Civ was on the Amiga, on the ST, and on the PC.

I spent a lot of time playing on the ST, but I certainly played a lot less than half all of the games produced for it, it may well be that I played less than 5% of the games that were produced for the ST, and I possibly don't remember the names of all the games I did play.

Beelzebub1111

2024-03-04, 09:32 AM

Palworld and Helldivers 2care a good example of how price affects perception.

If either of these games were 70-80 dollar AAA titles they would not have been as successful as they are. But people feel a lot better purchasing them and recommending them at their 30-40 dollar price point and have gained such a wider audience and much larger return despite their lower price-point.

I think there is something to be learned from this.

Cespenar

2024-03-04, 11:28 AM

Trying out something called Terminator: Dark Fate: Defiance, which is a very interesting RTS from Slitherine, the "good but jank" fellows.

As far as RTSs go, it's pretty unorthodox in several ways. It has kinda realistic ranges and damages, so you sometimes engage at silly distances like two city blocks or whatever. Or a tank just appears from the fog of war and just wastes your humvee with one shot.

Also, you need trucks or jeeps to tow other vehicles, which in turn need drivers, who can be normal units with the normal driving skill, but tanks need a tank driving skill, etc.

Oh yeah, and it's a very "russian school" kind of game, with ammo, fuel, permaloss of units, etc. -- case in point, I lost my only tank in the third mission and said what the hell and just continued. The next mission was thus as hard as the last missions of normal games.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-04, 01:24 PM

No to bench Idira until the game finally lets me do what the Imperial Creed requests and get rid of the witch.

Idira is part of Cassia's cheerleader/cleanup squad for me. Uses buffs to start combat then knocks out anything that the Emperor's Own Delete Button didn't make it round to.

warty goblin

2024-03-04, 07:11 PM

Trying out something called Terminator: Dark Fate: Defiance, which is a very interesting RTS from Slitherine, the "good but jank" fellows.

This is on my "to be played" list, your description makes it sound right up my ally, so it got moved up the queue a bit.

But it'll have to wait. I'm not allowing myself to start any new games until I wrap up Knight's Tale, and I just hit Chapter 3 (of 5, but I think the last chapter is some sort of ongoing 'seasonal' style stuff I'll probably mostly skip.) I finally got high enough on the Righteous track to unlock the Lancelot recruitment mission. Sadly, it's a level 14 mission, and my two highest level heroes are 12. I might chance it if I had four level 12s, but I think my 11s and 10s would be utterly obliterated by a 3-4 level gap. The scaling isn't super ridiculous in this game, but the number of enemies is often borderline nutso, so your chosen party either needs to be able to tank all day long, or else dish out a lot of hurt to keep the tanks from getting overwhelmed. Mordred has become a borderline unkillable block of iron, thanks to a couple items that give +Armor on a kill, and Merlin is legit bonkers broken, but I don't think they can hard carry through that. Better level up a bit first. Ah well.

Also, Chapter 3 brings the Fae, and the Fae are scary. They move fast, hit like tons of bricks, and have a lot of abilities that ignore overwatch, so you can't even set up the usual line of death and cleave everybody's face before they even get a swing off.

Bohandas

2024-03-05, 12:03 AM

I've become somewhat obsessed with Infinite Craft (https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/). Is any of you remember Doodle God (https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/540083) it's like that but it's got a word-associating AI programmed into it so that the game is really endless

https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/

Zevox

2024-03-05, 01:05 PM

So I've reached the Golden Saucer in FF7 Rebirth. Feels like roughly the midpoint of the game, with all my characters at level 30 now. Still greatly enjoying it - the combat's just fantastic, Remake's combat was already the best action-RPG combat system I've seen, and this is just that but better, with more options and characters to play. I've added Yuffie to my team at this point, and while I got to play her in the Integrade DLC for Remake, having her alongside the party members really reinforces just how much fun she is to play. Her ability to rapidly swap between close-combat physical attacks and long-range magical attacks in the midst of a fight is just a joy to employ, and makes her the most flexible character in the party by far. It's hard for me to leave her out of the party now, which is a bit of an issue since it is a 3-character party size, just like the original.

They integrated Yuffie into the story this time, too, and she gets a lot more building up as far as relationships with the others in the group and her role in the team dynamic go since they now know when she'll actually be present during the story. She was a character I kind of disliked in original FF7, so this is all a huge improvement to me. Not that it makes her my favorite (besides to play) or anything, that's still Barret for sure, but the fact that I'm not questioning why we even keep her around alone is a big deal compared to the original game.
You first run into her in Junon's undercity, where she's taken refuge after the events of Integrade; you save her from the sea monster attack there instead of the random girl from the original game. She doesn't join you then though - turns out the mayor of Junon's undercity has hired her to assassinate Rufus Shinra while he's in town for the parade. She comes close to doing so, but of course fails (though ruining a deal Rufus tries to strike with Cloud in the process, as he assumes the assassin to be working with Avalanche). After that you see her briefly as a stowaway on the ship to Costa Del Sol, then she finally joins you properly in Costa Del Sol, after jumping in to help you deal with Hojo's nonsense there.
Minor aside, but having just played Persona 3 Reload, boy was it distracting to hear Mitsuru Kirijo's voice coming from a Shinra Commander in this game. Not inappropriate, she has that kind of commanding presence and tone, but still pretty distracting.

Should probably say, it feels like the game's relationship system is stacked in such a way that you get more opportunities to improve your relationship with Tifa and Aerith than the others. I've had random story events improve my relationship with them multiple times, and thus far only a single such event affect anyone else. Kind of feels like I'm going to need to deliberately sabotage my scores with those two if I actually want Barret to be my highest - if I'm not too late already, that is.

Another thing I should perhaps note, this game is just as heavy on mini-games as the original, if not more so, but thankfully most of them are actually fun this time around. Playing through original FF7 I know I was incredibly off-put by how awkward the mini-games were and just felt like they were getting in the way of the parts of the game I wanted to see; but here I'll actually go out of my way to play everyone I can in Queens Blood, or do the hard mode versions of the Fort Condor stages, or win every prize at the Costa Del Sol games. The one exception is the sit-ups mini-game with the gym folks, that one sucks; it's similar to the pull-ups/crunches mini-games from Remake, but they somehow made it harder. Fortunately none of the prizes from that one seem like anything of any significance, so I don't think skipping it will matter.

My only real problem so far, aside from the open-worldy elements padding things a bit much at times, is that the combat's proving a bit too easy. After being on normal for a little bit I turned the difficulty up to "dynamic," the hardest setting available at the start, which is supposed to adjust the difficulty based on your skill somehow, but doesn't really feel like it's doing anything. I'm sure a hard mode will unlock after beating the game once, just like in Remake, but in the meantime I'm still routinely a little sad by how quickly bosses die - I don't even get to unload Limit Breaks out them more often than not. Only Chadley's fights with the summons seem to be providing much challenge, and there the full-power versions are clearly not beatable until much later in the game, you just can't survive them pulling out their big mid-fight attacks and difficulty spikes when you first get access to them.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-05, 03:13 PM

Mostly just reply to people in these threads, so I figure I should share my own thoughts on what I've been playing. This is a lot of text so I'm going to spoiler each game section to keep it compact. None of these have major story spoilers, though.

I really enjoyed LAD7 and its change-up to the series, though it had some growing pains from the shift to turn-based combat, so I was excited for LAD8 to go all out. After finishing it, however, I found myself disappointed overall. While they did address most of the major complaints about the combat with new additions, I feel like they didn't go far enough to make it shine. The new movement options and greater control over contextual attacks is appreciated, but I still found the class system underwhelming and it once again breaks down into mindless usage of your strongest "spells" past the midgame. Most of the classes have near identical movesets, covering the full range of single and multi target attacks; plus knockbacks and grapples, which made class changing and skill inheritance feel redundant. In the end, the combat is serviceable enough, but I found it started to drag before the game was over.

Story-wise, I found this to be the weakest entry of all the Yakuza games I've played (0, Kiwami, LAD7 and LAD8). The series is trying to move on from revolving entirely around the Yakuza, but it hasn't managed to land on a consistent theme. Much of the game is taken up with gazing back at the rest of the series, especially the Kiryu portions, and it doesn't leave much else to say. The main plot almost feels like a side story, with a cast of weak villains save for one and a laughable scheme from the main antagonists. It also feels terribly paced, with no captivating hook until Chapter 6 or 7, and a deluge of interruptions, especially that of the Sujimon and Dondoko Island minigames. Personally, I'm not a fan of Pokemon combat or Animal Crossing, so both fell flat - especially Sujimon. Frankly, a minigame centered around a stripped down version of a turn-based RPG (Pokemon) feels very out of place as side content in a game that's already a turn-based RPG.

In the end I did finish the game so it held my attention long enough to see it through, and I did enjoy the bittersweet memories of Kiryu looking back on his life, but it made me feel uncertain for the future of the series. If they've already ran out of interesting ideas in the second game of the new style, where does it go from here?

Arrowhead's Helldivers was one of the best sleeper hits when it released years ago, so the trailer for Helldivers 2 immediately caught my attention. Happy to say it's better than the original in almost every way, while keeping the same zany mix of serious action and hilarious friendly fire. It's taken the gaming community by storm, so there's not much more to be said. Especially since they've tamped down all the launch issues now. If you have any interest in a tongue-in-cheek co-op shooter that somehow makes you feel like special forces and a total stooge in equal parts, give it a go.

I should probably give this game props for its monetization, too. You can find the premium currency in fairly decent amounts strewn about the levels and the "battle passes" have no expiration dates at all. I'm far more offended by FOMO baiting than paid content, so this all sits well with me.

Haven't finished this one, but it's hitting me in the same way Subnautica did. It's a chill game about driving through a creepy, ever changing zone straight out of the movie Annihilation. Armed with not much more than an old station wagon, you plot routes into the unknown, following orders from a trio of bickering scientists that have been trapped for too long. Unlike most survival crafting games, this plays out like a roguelite, Tarkov-like extraction run. You move from map to map, harvesting resources and dealing with the oddities the Zone throws at you, before opening a path back to your garage to rest, research, restock, and return to the drive. Perhaps the most interesting part of this game is how you're very rarely under any immediate threat, but you always feel on the edge of danger. It's the essence of "95% uneventful, 5% pants-wetting terror." Many drives consist of scavenging the various shacks and abandoned detritus left behind by the researchers without issue, to the point you may wonder if anything can kill you at all. And then you'll have that one run where everything goes horribly wrong in an instant - maybe you wander just a bit too far from your car and while your back is turned, you hear an alert from your HUD mixed with the sound of wrenching metal and spin to see your ride getting dragged into the forest and off a cliff.

Honestly, I'd recommend this just because it's a fairly original mix of ideas, even if most of those ideas are individually pulled from elsewhere.

I'm not sure why I picked this up, to be blunt. It got a lot of good press, but I feel as though I've grown tired of the hack-n-slash ARPG. I suppose after Diablo IV gave me those thoughts, I wanted to give the genre one last try to win me back. Last Epoch is a decently well-made game, though its not winning any awards for plot; originality; or presentation. It has some neat elements in the customizable skills and varied mastery classes, but many of the skills don't have the visual/aural oomph that really sells the power fantasy these games are known for. I can't say how well it stacks against Diablo or Path of Exile, only that it definitely hasn't rekindled any love for this style of game.

Zevox

2024-03-05, 03:42 PM

I'm only about six hours into it so far, so I can't say much. The beginning scene of the game felt very out of place and actually confused me, though Kalm and the Nibelheim flashback right after were well-done. The open-world gave me a small wave of revulsion, especially once I saw the first Ubisoft tower, but I'll admit I don't have any feelings specific to this game's world yet. Combat is fun and flashy, though the addition of the new Synergy skills and abilities feel unnecessary at the moment, even if they're fun to see. So far I'm expecting to enjoy the combat and main content of this one, but probably hate the navel-gazing plot and excessive side content.
If you'd like some answers about that opening scene, I can give some (not based on spoilers from later in Rebirth, just based on Remake and older games); although I'd say that they intend it to be confusing at this point, as it's something they're doing that's entirely new, not a part of the original FF7, and even what little more I've seen of it hasn't told me much I didn't know going in.
Basically, Zack's events appear to be occurring in another timeline entirely. If you know the original plot of FF7 (or Crisis Core, the game they made to focus entirely on Zack's story), Zack is supposed to be dead; but at the end of Remake, we saw a scene where he survived the fight where he was supposed to die. The implication being that this was made possible when you defeat the Whispers, who were keeping "fate" on its predetermined course, at the end of FF7 Remake. But that's incompatible with the regular story occurring as it has in the main timeline we've been playing through Remake and Rebirth; hence alternate timeline.

I'm not sure where they're going with that exactly, Zack's timeline hasn't shown up much more for me yet despite being quite a bit further in the game , though I have some guesses based on what little more I've seen. They're highly speculative though, could be way off-base.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-05, 04:48 PM

Oh, I totally understood it from a plot perspective. I was more confused why they'd open the game that way. It was an awkward transition and, according to you, hasn't had much relevance on the plot so far.

Zevox

2024-03-05, 06:09 PM

I think part of it is that particular character is a director favorite or something, while I've never found them that interesting. Maybe it'll be more important down the line when the inevitable exposition dump happens, though.
I have a suspicion on that matter as well. I think it's because they want the game bookended in certain ways, basically. They told us before the game came out that Rebirth ends at the end of the original game's disk 1 - aka the single most famous event from the game. So...
The game opens with Aerith's death in Zack's timeline, and ends with her death in the main timeline. That's the baseline a rationale I saw upon first watching the scene. I suspect it goes further than just that too, but that gets into some of my speculation, which is based on information from scenes you haven't seen yet, and could be off-base anyway.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-05, 06:52 PM

Idira is part of Cassia's cheerleader/cleanup squad for me. Uses buffs to start combat then knocks out anything that the Emperor's Own Delete Button didn't make it round to.

I'm trying to roleplay as a very dogmatic priest(ess), so Idira as an unsanctioned psyker is very much someone I don't like. I will do a more Iconoclast or Heretical run at some point, probably as a Psyker/Officer, but it's just not to be this run.

Like build-wise she's fine, she's a buff monkey and I've learnt how to use her, but this run she's staying benched. Heinrix will serve as my resident psyker for now.

Zombimode

2024-03-06, 03:37 AM

This is on my "to be played" list, your description makes it sound right up my ally, so it got moved up the queue a bit.

Terminator: Dark Fate: Defiance is on my list as well :-)
But I'm in no hurry. Terminator is surely a game that will benefit of a round of patches :-)

Regarding Knights Tale: yes, the seasonal stuff can be skipped. The game properly ends after act 4. The seasonal extra content is gameplay-focused and comes a with a huge spike in enemy HP...
Personally the extra content was not for me. These are not "proper" story DLCs and the 5-fold* increase in HP kinda destroyed the combat dynamic.

*Probably an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

I've wrapped up the Burning Blood campaign of Spellforce 3. It was pretty good :-)
The weakest part were the RTS sections. Doing a "hero rush" to destroy the enemy headquarters was almost always possible and much quicker and easier than actually engaging with the RTS mechanics.

Saph

2024-03-06, 04:29 AM

I've been playing a new game that's been making the rounds of the roguelike community, called Balatro (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379780/Balatro/). Roguelike poker, basically.

It is REALLY hard. I've managed to get to the top difficulty, but I've yet to beat it in 5-10 tries, though I've come close.

Cygnia

2024-03-06, 08:54 AM

I've been playing a new game that's been making the rounds of the roguelike community, called Balatro (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379780/Balatro/). Roguelike poker, basically.

It is REALLY hard. I've managed to get to the top difficulty, but I've yet to beat it in 5-10 tries, though I've come close.

It's not a lootbox type of game to buying certain packs with Real Money, is it? Hubby likes poker and his birthday is next month...

Cespenar

2024-03-06, 09:31 AM

Nah, no "actual" gambling in it, fortunately. it's just the latest numbers-get-multiplied deckbuilder roguelike that came around.

It is extremely slick and pretty addictive, though.

Saph

2024-03-06, 01:05 PM

Yep, there's no betting/gambling, just "make the best poker hand you can". You get a certain number of hands and discards, and you have to beat a certain target score to go up to the next level.

You can also get jokers (that provide permanent bonuses to each hand), level ups (that make each type of hand score more), and bonuses that multiply your hand score. Then you can get bonuses that multiply the multiplier on your hand score. All of those things are multiplicative, so you quickly get ridiculously high scores . . . however, the target score scales up just as fast.

The basic mechanics are very simple, but there are a huge variety of jokers, each of which skew your run in a different direction, so each run can feel quite different.

Zevox

2024-03-06, 07:49 PM

Some Persona 3 Reload news: The Answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIkpLo42GM) is coming as DLC (along with some other more pointless stuff bundled in an "Expansion Pass") this September. No mention of price, or if the DLC will be available individually rather than just as part of the pass, but there should be an answer on the latter soon since the first of the less important DLC, music from some of the other games, drops on March 12th.

Personally, definitely a "wait and see what people say when it's out" one for me. The Answer was tedious and grindy and I never finished it in FES, just watched the cutscenes on Youtube instead. To some degree the modernizations of the game, like selectable skill inheritance, controllable party members, and the addition of things like Theurgies should help with that, but I'm not sure they'll eliminate it. And as much as I love Persona 3, I am not eager to pay extra for The Answer of all things.

Now, if this portends them doing the same thing with the female protagonist path next year, that'll be another story. That I'd be happy to toss a decent amount of extra money at them for. But not The Answer, not without some major improvements.

On FF7 Rebirth, I'm now into Gongaga Jungle. Just a few remarks to make:
- My initial Golden Saucer date wound up being Tifa, although it feels like Barret wasn't even an option for plot reasons at the time anyway.
- Barret's backstory was quite well-done, a head-tilting moment or two aside. Loved the callback to Barret's line to Tifa after the fall of Sector 7 in Remake.
- I now have Cait Sith in the party. I believe the technical term for his gameplay style is "f***in' weird." Which, you know, it's Cait Sith, so I kinda saw that coming, but still. He's instantly the character I want to play the least and is now my designated bench-warmer and materia leveler (since, thank heavens, everyone gains XP and AP even when not in the active party). Though at least him joining you is a bit less forced than in the original - he makes himself more useful. And Barret remains skeptical of him, which, knowing what's coming with him, good instincts there.
- You still get the dune buggy, to my surprise. That was always a weird bit of FF7 to me, and felt like it was probably unnecessary in the remake, especially after I saw you could swim in Rebirth, since its original main purpose was crossing rivers for some reason. But it's still here, and actually faster than walking this time, so that's nice.
- Gongaga Jungle feels like it's going to be the area that bugs me the most on a replay. I'm okay with it so far on the first time through, but it's big, dense, maze-like, and is kind of giving me Dragon Age: Inquisition area vibes, which is not a compliment coming from me. (Inquisition is the one Bioware game I've played but never been able to finish a re-run of because of its giant areas.)

Cygnia

2024-03-07, 12:56 PM

Just finished demo'ing "Sir Whoopass: Immortal Death". It's hilarious, but the mechanics are a tad janky. Even though it's on sale, holding off buying it for the time being...

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-07, 04:41 PM

My build just felt too distant for a Rogue Trader even before the end of Act 1, especially as I couldn't use my weapons AND Officer abilities in a single turn. So restarting, minmax time, let's go for the least lore appropriate option.

That's right, Voidborn Sanctioned Psyker (Pyromancer) Officer, Willpower pumped as high as I can go, trained to be part of an Imperial Guard psyker squad, snatched up by an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor to help deal with a Xenos artifact, and then dumped on Theodora due to a mixture of her heritage and a tendency to keep setting things on fire.

Then I got halfway through the prologue and I'm getting the idea that psyker is the intended choice.

Likely also going to pick up Telepathy, but mainly building to throw out fire and extra turns.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-07, 05:00 PM

TBH I just lean into maximum officer.

Noble Officer. I am far too important to do things for myself.

Yes, Yes I do take every single opportunity to have Abelard introduce me.

My current battle strategy is:

Cassia and the RT both have Seize the Initiative to give them extra turns, Cassia uses hers to use Bring it Down on Idira who uses Prescience on Cassia and Forewarning on Abelard and sets up some Prey. RT uses his on Abelard who uses Brace for Impact with the Get into Cover upgrade which gives everyone an extra turn with 3 move, Cassia moves up everyone else stays behind her. RT is a Master Strategist so comes up first, places zones, uses You Serve Me, Voice of Command, and Air of Authority on Cassia, then Bring it Down. Now we have handed out 10 extra turns and an additional +25 or so bonus stats to Cassia and she has about 200 willpower. All her damaging moves scale with willpower so you can see where this is going. She uses Lidless Stare to annihilate a large section of the encounter almost certainly triggering High Momentum, bounces the turn back to the RT and immediately gets a Finest Hour which lets her rampage around the battlefield using Lidless Stare and Held in my Gaze to delete almost everything and almost certainly get back into High Momentum, uses Finest Hour to pass onto Idira who should now be buffed by Share the Spoils and empties her sniper rifle into anything that isn't dead yet.

Quite a lot of the time entire encounters die before the first turn of the first character is over. Also Cassia has about 120 wounds at this point because there's a talent that makes that scale with willpower as well.

And when Cassia's actual turn comes up You Do Something and Air of Authority means she has 6 AP and a staff that makes the first navigator power not consume her attack for the turn.

Emperor's Own Delete Button.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-07, 09:42 PM

Honestly the RT being anything but an Officer feels weird to me, especially as it's the archetype that focuses on fellowship. Noble would make a lot of sense, but as 40k tends to show Psykers as the ones being corrupted all the time the idea of being an incredibly Dogmatic one appealed to me.

Plus there's a VERY nice female psyker portrait to use.

I'll probably do an Iconoclast run at some point, but to me it feels like it's against the spirit of 40k. So it's Dogmatic first, with as much Willpower as the game lets me stack.

Rynjin

2024-03-07, 09:47 PM

Surprised you went Pyro instead of Sanctic for your Dogmatic Psyker.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-07, 10:40 PM

Surprised you went Pyro instead of Sanctic for your Dogmatic Psyker.

IIRC Heinrix is Biomancy/Santic, so I'll likely have easy access to those powers later on. I may or may not take it over Telepathy, but I shall smite the enemies of the Emperor with His holy flames!

It's not overly synergistic with Officer role-wise, but Pyromancy runs off one of the primary Officer characteristics and so it works well enough.

I actually wanted Telekinesis, but that's not an option. Late game abilities to move enemies around would be grand, especially on an Officer.

Rynjin

2024-03-07, 11:08 PM

I was pretty peeved about the lack of Telekinesis...then baffled by the staff I found in Act 4 that requires Telekinesis.

Errorname

2024-03-09, 03:00 PM

Started up a new Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, and I really do love the Origin concept. I get why it's not standard practice, it is a ton of work to implement, but it's very cool.

Also interesting to play through this game in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, since this was sort of Bioware's version of the same concept.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-09, 03:30 PM

Plus there's a VERY nice female psyker portrait to use.

The Male Commissar portrait is the only one for me. Imagine going into space with anything less than the most glorious moustache possible?

I was pretty peeved about the lack of Telekinesis...then baffled by the staff I found in Act 4 that requires Telekinesis.

It was in some of the early/beta versions but they've taken it out and not removed the staff. It might come back with one of the DLCs.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-09, 07:54 PM

Started up a new Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, and I really do love the Origin concept. I get why it's not standard practice, it is a ton of work to implement, but it's very cool.

Also interesting to play through this game in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, since this was sort of Bioware's version of the same concept.

I am surprised by how much people praised the conversations in BG3 as mini cutscenes and said that it was the way forward for WRPGs. Because when I played I immediately realized that it's been done before, and actually pretty well, and there was a reason many studios abandoned it.

I should give DA:O another playthrough. City Elf Rogue, obviously.

The Male Commissar portrait is the only one for me. Imagine going into space with anything less than the most glorious moustache possible?

Why on earth would I play a man?

Although I would totally be down for a Queen Amidala hairdo on my next run.

warty goblin

2024-03-09, 08:58 PM

I think the difference in technology available now and when Origins released is pretty salient. BG3's facial tech is good enough to convey emotion effectively, and they do a pretty good job of camera work and editing. My recollection of Origins is that it... doesn't really manage that. Really, I mostly recall playing the human noble origin, and watching my daddy Eddard Stark's tragic death scene get elevated into surrealist comedy by the blood decal under him disappearing and reappearing with every change in camera angle.

I'm also not sure anybody has abandoned it so much as it's expensive and hard enough that a fair number of smaller studios aren't capable of it. It requires full 3D, which means a lot of semi-recent cRPGs using 2D backgrounds really can't. But Bioware hasn't ever stopped, Larien pretty clearly prefers it, they used cutscene type dialog in Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (and it's seven zillion versions) and Dragon Commander. Even Solasta does it, although with their severely potato shaped character models they maybe shouldn't have.

And I have to say, why people go for cutscene type dialog. Gaming is generally a visual medium, and a zoomed out view of two models maybe making default gestures at each other is not exactly visually compelling.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-09, 09:15 PM

I was actually thinking of the ME3/DAI era for the really mature version of it, and while BG3 is a lot better than that it's still clearly a LOT of work that many games don't need. I suspect that at best the standard will be what Owlcat's doing: 3D environments that allow you to do dramatic cutscenes while keeping conversations in the overhead view. It's a genre which trends towards long scripts*, and so there's going to be a tension between having nicer dialogue scenes and having all the dialogue you want.

Plus there's something odly charming when top down RPGs try to show battles and the characters act as if they were using the combat engine.

* Disco Elysium would likely not have been possible with cutscene dialogue, and I think benefits from the somewhat detached view.

SerTabris

2024-03-09, 11:04 PM

Hmm, not sure what I'd do if that one happened. It feels a bit weird to buy a game when I only want to play the DLC for it and not the base game.

Gongaga Jungle feels like it's going to be the area that bugs me the most on a replay. I'm okay with it so far on the first time through, but it's big, dense, maze-like, and is kind of giving me Dragon Age: Inquisition area vibes, which is not a compliment coming from me. (Inquisition is the one Bioware game I've played but never been able to finish a re-run of because of its giant areas.)

I definitely relate, there. I figure, Bioware was about as good at doing open-world areas as Bethesda was at writing interesting companions. Which... yeah.

Started up a new Dragon Age: Origins playthrough, and I really do love the Origin concept. I get why it's not standard practice, it is a ton of work to implement, but it's very cool.

Also interesting to play through this game in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, since this was sort of Bioware's version of the same concept.

I definitely agree, though I feel like it does stick out in parts that some origins are getting more content than others. Which one are you doing, out of curiosity?

Plus there's something odly charming when top down RPGs try to show battles and the characters act as if they were using the combat engine.

* Disco Elysium would likely not have been possible with cutscene dialogue, and I think benefits from the somewhat detached view.

Sometimes they even are! I remember when I was playing Pathfinder Kingmaker and some after-battle dialogue had a character move, and slip on the Grease spell that had been placed during combat. Everyone just waited for him to pass his save and get back up.

Errorname

2024-03-10, 05:59 AM

It's very expensive and a lot of modern CRPGs have a pretty slim budget, but if a studio can afford it they generally go for it, it does add a lot.

I definitely agree, though I feel like it does stick out in parts that some origins are getting more content than others. Which one are you doing, out of curiosity?

I ran through all of them but the character I'm sticking with through this run is the Human Noble, which if I remember right is definitely one of the more content heavy ones.

Cespenar

2024-03-10, 10:10 AM

Tried a short Korean game called No Case Should Remain Unsolved. Pretty good.

Plays a bit like a budget text based Obra-Dinn-ish narrative puzzler. You are basically restructuring/healing the memories of a police detective in a missing person case, in which there are transcripts of the dialogues and depositions of the suspects. You piece out the story, assign the right depositions to the right characters and fix the order of the dialogues as well.

Nice story and twists too, as much as a several hours' game can manage.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-10, 10:55 AM

It's very expensive and a lot of modern CRPGs have a pretty slim budget, but if a studio can afford it they generally go for it, it does add a lot.

See Also

#shadowheart bg3 | moonselune

Oh sure. It's just WRPGs are a niche genre, and I wouldn't expect BG3 to change that. Especially as costs can still ballon uncontrollably without such cutscenes, it's why PoE 2 took so long to break even and why there are unlikely to be new games in the series

But games which use Bethesda style 'look at still occasionally stock animating 3D model' conversations? I can see those disappearing.

I ran through all of them but the character I'm sticking with through this run is the Human Noble, which if I remember right is definitely one of the more content heavy ones.

IIRC it's human Noble as the most content heavy, followed by I think Dwarf Commoner and City Elf. I think the main issue is that they didn't go through with the idea of Loghain's number two being the villain from your chosen Origin and just stuck with the Human Noble one.

SerTabris

2024-03-10, 12:57 PM

Oh, that sounds like an interesting idea! Though how well it could work definitely varies. I could definitely see it working pretty well for CE and honestly not being that much different in terms of the rest of the story (having the same 'awful human Arl of Denerim' social position), but I'm not sure about the dwarven ones and I can't think of who it'd even be for Dalish. For a mage... maybe, but there might be some adjustment needed. I'd definitely like to see how those would have gone though.

But I also think that there should have been at least some possible reference to the fact that the CE has already been to the Arl of Denerim's Estate. And, you know, probably killed almost everyone in it.

Errorname

2024-03-10, 02:11 PM

I think the main issue is that they didn't go through with the idea of Loghain's number two being the villain from your chosen Origin and just stuck with the Human Noble one.

Would be hard to make that work with most of the Origins as written, and what it'd probably come down to is just having Howe (or his replacement) involved in all of them, which I don't think would be very good.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-10, 04:28 PM

Why on earth would I play a man?

Because they've unaccountably forgotten to give the female portraits moustaches at all, let alone the full General Melchett. How are you supposed to civilise space without it?

Zevox

2024-03-10, 05:29 PM

Ah, so, it's been a long haul, but I'm finally closing in on the end of FF7 Rebirth. Finished Nibelheim, just a stay at the Golden Saucer separates me from what must be the endgame, given when the devs said the ending is compared to the original game. Looking forward to-

Game: New side-quests have opened in every region! Also, most of the game's mini-games now have harder challenges with new rewards, and you have a kinda-sorta boat that can sail the seas and a new side-quest related to that.

...damn it Square-Enix, you know there might be such a thing as having too much content in your game, right?

(I'd skip straight to the story stuff, except the new things that have opened up now are actually the good side-content. I've dealt with all of Chadley's Open-World Filler at this point, which is a huge part of what slows the game down.)

tonberrian

2024-03-10, 09:30 PM

Thinking of picking up Fallout 4 again, and since i have the luxury of playing on PC, was wondering about good mods. I think i want to find one that lets me craft, or at least move around, legendary prefixes, but other than that I don't have anything I'm dying for. I'm also going to see about abandoning Preston and his crew in Concord, at least for the moment, until i do some things in Nuka World so he won't be mad at me.

AlanBruce

2024-03-11, 10:16 AM

...damn it Square-Enix, you know there might be such a thing as having too much content in your game, right?

I finished the game a few days ago and have returned to pick up any trophies, since you unlock chapter select, just like in Remake before.

I may be in the minority here, but I believe they shouldve either eased on the mini games, or not made them mandatory for completionists. I was never a fan of Fort Condor in the DLC. And here we have an entire subquest dedicated to that game. The same can be said for Gears & Gambits. I understand they wanted to give players things to do other than the main story. And some of them are in my opinion, genuinely fun and relaxing (Queens Blood and the piano come to mind).

warty goblin

2024-03-11, 10:43 AM

This is very much a milage may vary thing, I tend to find zoomed out static shots of vaguely gesturing models kinda boring myself. It certainly does nothing to elevate the material over reading a picture book with kinda dull illustrations and an inflated word count. Which segues nicely to my second criticism, anything that enforces some level of restraint in cRPG scripts is fine with me, because I find most of them to be really overwritten.

I always figured PoE2 came in lukewarm because the genre was fairly saturated at that point, and was moving beyond Obsidian's very backwards looking take. I certainly was unable to rustle up any enthusiasm for an atavistic throwback like that in a universe that contained Original Sin 2, a game that actually had ideas fresher than "contains guns" and "has weird stats." I'm not saying PoE2 is bad, it's just extremely conservative in an already super conservative genre, and I think it got scooped by other games that had selling points beyond being like BG2, a by that point nearly two decades old game. Nostalgia for any given thing has a declining audience.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-11, 12:27 PM

City Elf is just full of leftover pieces from early drafts, there's still a casual mention of magical healers. But honestly I just wish that when the idea was dropped that the non-HN Origins got more content, particularly the two elf ones. The other three are at least linked to major parts of the game, those two not so much.

I suspect it got dropped due to a mixture of justifying some of the characters and not wanting to write the conversations six times. Because two are still in states where Howe would be very easy to replace.

Because they've unaccountably forgotten to give the female portraits moustaches at all, let alone the full General Melchett. How are you supposed to civilise space without it?

'Abelard, civilise this planet' :smallwink:

Errorname

2024-03-11, 01:32 PM

I find Josh Sawyer's Deadfire Post-Mortem (https://youtu.be/xChOXFJ83-g?t=36) really interesting, although it is more about lukewarm responses from people who bought and played the game

It would be easy to integrate Howe (or a replacement Loghain Henchman) into the City Elf origin, but everywhere else? I guess you could make Jowan or the Templar Commander into a more villainous character that would work as Loghain's right hand, but I don't see any opportunity for it with the Orzammer or Dalish origins.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-11, 01:54 PM

Have Leske throw Jarvia under the bus at the end of Dwarf Commoner, she flees to the surface and tries to take her revenge on the Warden, Leske takes over the Carta.

For the Magi you'd clearly have Uldred trying to tear you down as Irving's prized pupil, and probably actually somewhat softening the relationship if you didn't betray Jowan. But that requires a much bigger reworking of the Origin.

On that note establish that at least one of the interlopers in the Dalish Elf origin is the son of a Bann, ideally the one who can be killed.

For Human Commoner? Dwynn.

Errorname

2024-03-11, 05:32 PM

Remembering why I've struggled to actually stick with a playthrough of Origins to the end. I do not care for a lot of the combat, although I think I'm one of the few people who doesn't utterly loathe the Fade segment.

I like the idea of giving Uldred a bit more of a role in the Mage Origin, but Uldred is already filling a different villainous role to Howe. My issue with the idea is that making Loghain's chief henchmen modular based on your origin feels a little artificial in the way that having each origin introduce different important characters early doesn't.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-11, 05:43 PM

A lot of the combat goes away when you get the mass hold spell. Especially if you're a rogue and once it goes off you get infinity backstabs and you start posting absolutely silly damage numbers with every attack.

Zevox

2024-03-11, 06:34 PM

Got Barret for the second Golden Saucer date event, though I did have to deliberately sabotage my score with Tifa and Aerith to do so. Doesn't feel like there was too much unique to this event based on who you went with, but it was nice seeing his at least, some good moments in there.

I finished the game a few days ago and have returned to pick up any trophies, since you unlock chapter select, just like in Remake before.

But if youre going for platinum, placing some trophies behind incredibly annoying mini games. Or worse- making already frustrating activities even worse (looking at you, Crunch Off game), is not the way to keep the players coming back.
:smallconfused: I don't understand that criticism. Granted, I'm someone who has never given a single crap about achievements/trophies/whatever you want to call them, but if the reason you would is completionism, then the goal there is to experience and complete everything the game has to offer, whatever it may be, right? If not, what is the reason? Because then I really don't understand.

Personally, I'd say most of the mini-games in Rebirth are actually pretty good and at least somewhat fun, and very few are difficult to beat even the hardest challenge on - the exceptions being the sit-ups, which I do kind of hate, and the piano, which I managed to squeak out A ranks on most of the songs for it, but sincerely doubt I'll do it with the Red XIII theme (at least, that's what I assume it is, the name's weird; it was the second to last one I believe). And I wouldn't call the piano mini-game bad, just hard, at least for the last few songs. I actually very much liked Fort Condor and went out of my way to do all of that one's hard challenges despite the lack of a reward; oddly, not nearly as much of a fan of Gears & Gambits. Not sure why that one doesn't work as well for me, but I just wasn't enjoying it nearly as much, I barely beat its last normal mission, and I don't intend to do the hard ones.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-11, 06:41 PM

My main issue with the Fade is all the backtracking to get the stat boosts, especially as getting that +5 Cunning early unlocks all the skills when playing as a Warrior or Mage. It makes the early game somewhat samey.

Oh sure, the current way is better. I'd just have preferred if the setup from my favourite Origin was followed up on.

Dragon Age combat has a sweet spot at about levels 7-10, where you actually have options but haven't worked you way to the broken abilities yet.

I think it's also better if you go with the intended party of Warrior/Warrior/Mage/Rogue, instead of just running two mages with all the crowd control. I'm tempted to do a Dalish Archer Warrior run to make that practically required.

Errorname

2024-03-11, 06:58 PM

A lot of the combat goes away when you get the mass hold spell.

It's not that I'm struggling with it, I just don't like it. I've never been a fan of RTWP combat to begin with, always preferred proper turn based games.

GloatingSwine

2024-03-11, 06:59 PM

Tbh my best play through was mage mage warrior dog. But thats because I was playing an absolute git and killed everyone except Morrigan, Sten, Oghren and the dog.

I eventually turned that mage into an unstoppable god warrior with max con, arcane warrior and all the buff spells in heavy armour to get the hard mode achievements. Most things could only do single digits of damage to me.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-11, 10:38 PM

It's not that I'm struggling with it, I just don't like it. I've never been a fan of RTWP combat to begin with, always preferred proper turn based games.

Oh Dragon Age combat is pretty bad, RTWP is just the worst of both worlds. Honestly I see no issue with modding it into brainless mode and then reading a book during fights.

Tbh my best play through was mage mage warrior dog. But thats because I was playing an absolute git and killed everyone except Morrigan, Sten, Oghren and the dog.

While mages are great and easy to break the game with, I've recently become much more fond of a less overly 'good' playthrough, which means my choices when it comes to rogue's are the PC or Leliana. And Leliana is great, but it's very easy to fall into having her and Alastair with you constantly.

...I'm going to start a new playthrough, I'm just unsure between City and Dalish Elf Rogue. Might end up doing a dual rogue party.

SerTabris

2024-03-11, 11:29 PM

I'd definitely have liked that, particularly as someone who did CE first (which... may be clear from my username, I suppose). Though the two feel like different kinds of missed opportunities; CE has some possible connections that aren't followed up on (though there is at least the Alienage itself and Shianni, and I remember feeling a bit sad in future playthroughs where she didn't trust me) whereas all the possible connections for DE just... left, off to the second game. And they're even kind of different there, especially Merrill, though since DA2 Merrill is absolutely adorable I'm not going to complain about that.

For more fun, there's even two! The actual Mass Paralysis spell, and the Glyph of Paralysis / Glyph of Repulsion explosion combo. I never really got that kind of thing my first playthrough, as DAO was my first western RPG after playing a lot of Final Fantasy and some other JRPGs, and those kinds of spells are rarely winners there.

Dragon Age combat has a sweet spot at about levels 7-10, where you actually have options but haven't worked you way to the broken abilities yet.

Hm, I hadn't thought of that. I generally found Warrior the least interesting of the classes to actually play, and didn't really like more than one warrior companion (maybe one and a half, counting Shale as a not-quite-warrior) and thought the rogues and mages were more interesting. I may do this when I do City Elf again and have my protagonist as a dual-wielding warrior instead of a rogue, though. But, my whole first playthrough I had a warrior, two rogues, and a mage just based on using the people I liked.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 12:22 AM

Dalish Elf actually had a lot of potential with the lack of connections. Sadly it would have probably required a lot of 'f*ck off human' options.

There is also one returning face, but they really don't do anything with that scene

Two rogues is fun, but the distribution of classes (four warriors and a dog to two mages and two rogues) makes the intent pretty clear.

The main issue with Warriors is so much of their class being tied up in weapon Talents, and then two if the party using the same set.

Started a Dalish Elf Rogue run, might go Warden/Alastair/Morrigan/Leliana for my standard party, swapping out Leliana when someone else is more suited. Lots of archery...

halfeye

2024-03-12, 12:39 AM

Is it actually possible to have a 4 wizard party in DAO?

Most of my party seem to spend a lot of their time missing (bows, daggers, swords etc.), is there a stat in DAO that cuts down on that?

SerTabris

2024-03-12, 12:39 AM

Dalish Elf actually had a lot of potential with the lack of connections. Sadly it would have probably required a lot of 'f*ck off human' options.

There is also one returning face, but they really don't do anything with that scene

Two rogues is fun, but the distribution of classes (four warriors and a dog to two mages and two rogues) makes the intent pretty clear.

The main issue with Warriors is so much of their class being tied up in weapon Talents, and then two if the party using the same set.

Started a Dalish Elf Rogue run, might go Warden/Alastair/Morrigan/Leliana for my standard party, swapping out Leliana when someone else is more suited. Lots of archery...

I suppose just not wanting to deal with humans kind of cuts a lot of things short; not sure quite where that would go. As for the distribution, that does make sense, though having done Orzammar last I didn't see Oghren much and one other one of those is mutually-exclusive. Though if Bioware really wanted me to use multiple warriors they would have had at least one woman in the class. :)

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 01:50 AM

Is it actually possible to have a 4 wizard party in DAO?

No, it's only possible in Inquisition. You can't do four Rogues either.

Most of my party seem to spend a lot of their time missing (bows, daggers, swords etc.), is there a stat in DAO that cuts down on that?

IIRC Dexterity affects accuracy, as well as Strength for melee attacks. Properly built archers should be hitting constantly by the end game as their Attack can scale nearly twice as fast as melee characters (you need to divert a few points if you want better armour, but not many).

If you've not got PRecise Striking/Aim on I highly recommend turning it on.

Yeah, but It's weird to get so few instances of it. I really get the idea that, like with Inquisition, the other races were an afterthought.

AlanBruce

2024-03-12, 03:05 AM

I did spend the afternoon doing the Chocobo Races, which are mandatory if you want to do a sidequest. They arent as frustrating, thankfully. The same cannot be said for Galactic Saviors and 3D Brawler, which require the highest score to get unique crafting materials.

I brute forced my way through Fort Condor and Gears & Gambits. In a game where speed is key in combat, since these remakes are a lot more action focused, those games became a slog. Again, you dont need to do them since theyre optional, but if youre a completionist, it makes you wonder if the devs tested these beforehand.

On the plus side, the Dolphin mini game was fun. Same for Queens Blood

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 09:51 AM

Already getting the urge to restart as a city elf and go dual daggers. Might do so, it does integrate a lot better with the main game

SerTabris

2024-03-12, 10:19 AM

Yeah, but It's weird to get so few instances of it. I really get the idea that, like with Inquisition, the other races were an afterthought.

Why do all those other players want to play as a human, anyway? Especially a noble human; not only is 'just a human' a bit boring, I never really liked the whole 'importance of noble families/bloodlines' thing and don't want to be more involved with it.

Zombimode

2024-03-12, 10:46 AM

I recently started playing Dungeon Rats.
Dungeon Rats could be described as a dungeon crawler that is almost exclusively focused on tactical turn-based battles. The game was made by Iron Tower Studios who debuted with the very unique and also quite excellent Age of Decadence and who have recently released Colony Ship. Dungeon Rats is their second game and is set in the same low-fantasy faux-roman antiquity setting as Age of Decadence. The setup is a simple but effective classic: the protagonist is thrown into a prison with no prospect of release. The prisoners survive by mining ore and trading that for food. There are no guards in this prison. Here, the strong rule over the weak. Your goal: survive! And maybe find a way out.
This is very Gothic, simple yet effective.
The atmosphere is very well realized, but Dungeon Rats is not a "proper" RPG: it is very linear, there are only few dialogues, few choices etc.
The meat of the game are the battles and cycle of reaping the rewards, improve your equipment, improve your skill and prepare for the next combat.

It is worth mentioning that this game is difficult. And that the balancing is very tight. Everything runs on sharply limited resources. You won't heal a single hit point without spending a finite and scarce resource. Thus the game is constantly building up pressure. It is possible to move into a fail-state long before you realized that: only when you do not have the resources to progress you will know that you have lost.

For me that constant pressure is a bit to much. I had to step back from the game for the time being after experiencing a difficulty spike in the first combat after "beating" the first area. A difficulty spike that is definitely not needed at this point and after I consumed most of my food (= healing) to beat the last two battles of the first area.
I think by playing Dungeon Rats I realized how much I enjoy the ebb and flow of mounting pressure and release that many games, especially RPGs (with the dichotomy Dungeon->Town), provide. Also the risk/reward relationship of "pushing through" to the next rest point without spending limited healing resources.

I miss that in Dungeon Rats. It it obviously intentional, but my personal enjoyment of a game is more important. Thus I will pick up the game again, but with the following "house-rule":
Whenever I conquer a new "base camp" (it is very clear what qualifies as a base camp in this game) my party will "rest" -> fully heal all lost hit points without spending food/healing items.
This house-rule will be implemented by using a console command to create food in the respective quantity. A cheat, obviously, but who cares.

To relax after my initial foray into Dungeon Rats, I have picked up a game that is anything but stressful: Viewfinder.
Viewfinder is a puzzle game with a very cozy and non-threatening atmosphere. The game's main "sthick" is the ability to create 3D spaces out of 2D pictures. Most of the puzzles are based around that concept.
My only criticism so far is that the puzzles so far are not that hard. There have been some headscratchers here and there, but for the most part the puzzles consist of one problem, maybe two.
This is in a stark contrast to, say, The Talos Principle (to date my favorite puzzle game) where all puzzles have multiple layers of problems to solve.

Cespenar

2024-03-12, 11:02 AM

The gimmick of Viewfinder was interesting, but I wish they'd have done more with it. It felt a bit like a tech demo at times for my taste.

Errorname

2024-03-12, 11:57 AM

Yeah, but It's weird to get so few instances of it. I really get the idea that, like with Inquisition, the other races were an afterthought.

You can definitely tell that Dragon Age started life as a much lower fantasy project than it eventually became, although with some of this I think it's less "the other races are an afterthought" and more "we need to write all this stuff race neutral", Inquisition in particular very much feels like if there's a correct and intended option it's a Dalish Inquisitor.

I find the dynamics of feudal politics pretty interesting and I do enjoy when an RPG lets you play those games as an insider.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 12:23 PM

Human Noble is by far the most 'standard' story of the six, potentially topped only by the cut Human Commoner and Avaar options marrying Anora as a reward for completing the blight. Which I agree is boring, especially as it's the only Origin with a clear intended ethnicity for the Warden (the Magi's and Dalish Elf's parents aren't shown, whereas the City Elf and Dwarfs could easily take after their missing parent).

Inquisition was designed for a human protagonist, we know that for a fact. The Dalish, especially Dalish Mage, integration is a bit sloppy as the Inquisitor is made basically clueless about their culture's lore.

I find the dynamics of feudal politics pretty interesting and I do enjoy when an RPG lets you play those games as an insider.

In which case Dwarf Noble is far more involved than the Human Noble, who was implicitly kept out of politics.

Personally I prefer to be the outsider who doesn't know the rules and leaves chaos in their wake. My favourite Origins are probably City Elf, Dwarf Commoner, Magi (an outsider, but accustomed to Circle politics), and finally Dalish (it only intersects the story once). Human Noble I can't bring myself to complete the opening section of when playing it.

Honestly if it wasn't for the creepily long arms on the female dwarf models I'd be doing a DC run. As it is I'll probably restart as a City Elf or Mage.

Zevox

2024-03-12, 12:37 PM

Regarding the sit ups, I do question why did they allocate the button prompts to R2,R1,L2 & L1. They couldve kept tje same buttons as in Remake. And to add insult to injury, they added a random green prompt that can throw you off balance and ruin your run. Especially against Jules.
I don't remember what the buttons were in Remake, but I do know I managed to beat the workout mini-games there. Here I barely cleared the one for the side-quest after a number of tries, and gave up on even the first of the optional ones...

On the plus side, the Dolphin mini game was fun. Same for Queens Blood
Galactic Savior I found quite easy - took only two tries to get the top score on notmal, and one on expert. It's basically Star Fox but simpler, so felt pretty natural to me.

3D Brawler was mostly good - took me some retries on Ifrit and Yuffie, but not too many. But I just did the "Ultimate Party Animal" there, and yeah, that one took a lot of tries and frustrated me. And from my few attempts at it the Sephiroth fight that unlocks after that quest is much worse, so yeah, not sure I'll do that one.

Chocobo races were surprisingly forgiving, which is good since I'm not a racing game fan myself. Nonetheless managed to flawless victory the Gold Cup, though they made the last race close.

I don't see why you'd wonder about testing on Forst Condor and Gears & Gambits? They're clearly quite polished and thought-out. They are mini-games that are about strategy, where and when to deploy units for maximum effect, rather than timing or reflexes like most of the rest, so they are a definite departure for the game, but I think that's part of why Fort Condor at least works as well as it does to me. (Again, not sure why I enjoyed Gears & Gambits so much less than Fort Condor.)

Honestly the Dolphin mini-game I was just glad was easy. It's kind of racing game esque as well, so again, not my jam. Queen's Blood's quite good though, for sure.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-12, 12:56 PM

In which case Dwarf Noble is far more involved than the Human Noble, who was implicitly kept out of politics.

Honestly if it wasn't for the creepily long arms on the female dwarf models I'd be doing a DC run. As it is I'll probably restart as a City Elf or Mage.

So, I've pretty much always played as a Dwarf Rogue and, being contrarian, a sword-and-board rogue, at that... I think I only start taking archery talents once I run out of other talents to take. I tried Noble for a while, and beat the game that way, but I *really* liked Dwarf Commoner. I think City Elf has the best introduction to Cailain, though.

"I'm here because I killed one of your nobles after he kidnapped me from my wedding and raped my friends."

I picture my character saying this, looking him dead in the eye, and daring him to question me on that.

Errorname

2024-03-12, 01:19 PM

Human Noble is by far the most 'standard' story of the six, potentially topped only by the cut Human Commoner and Avaar options marrying Anora as a reward for completing the blight.

Human Commoner probably would have topped it, considering how the big reason they did end up cutting it was that it was boring and they couldn't find a way to make it interesting. Human Barbarian sounds like it was cooler and more unique, it got cut because it needed a bunch of unique assets that wouldn't be used anywhere else in the game to sell it.

It's a shame because I do think they really needed an alternate start for non-mage humans.

In which case Dwarf Noble is far more involved than the Human Noble, who was implicitly kept out of politics.

Dwarf Noble absolutely has stronger plot hooks than Human Noble gets. I just generally don't play Dwarves, not my thing.

Admittedly if Origins let me be a Qunari I'd probably have gone with that.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 01:35 PM

I tend to delay Stealth over the weapon Talents, just because I always hate it when the game forces you out of it.

I think City Elf has the best introduction to Cailain, though.

"I'm here because I killed one of your nobles after he kidnapped me from my wedding and raped my friends."

I picture my character saying this, looking him dead in the eye, and daring him to question me on that.

It also has the best introduction to Duncan, where you can make slowly stronger threats of force to get him to leave (implicitly only restrained because other elves get first).

I have my own headcanons as to the personalities of the different Wardens: Human Noble is a glory hound, Magi is sheltered and innocent, Dwarf Noble is tired of putting on the good boy act, Dwarf Commoner is done with this ****, and the elves think humans can **** back off to their castles.

Although even elves fall for the charms of a French lesbian bard.

It's a shame because I do think they really needed an alternate start for non-mage humans.

I believe they also got cut due to sharing similarities with the elf Origins. Which is a shame as the Avaar basically got cut from the game entirely despite their homelands being the most under threat.

Errorname

2024-03-12, 03:09 PM

I'm sure the thematic overlap between a Dalish and Avvar background was a factor, but the exact stated justification was that they'd require a lot of bespoke dialogue plus a lot of environmental and costume assets that weren't necessary for anywhere else in the game. Which is hard to argue with

Rynjin

2024-03-12, 03:46 PM

Didn't they make about 80% of Inquisition with the intent that the main character would be Hawke again and then have to hastily go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff?

Errorname

2024-03-12, 04:36 PM

Didn't they make about 80% of Inquisition with the intent that the main character would be Hawke again and then have to hastily go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff?

Not 80%, but that's definitely how they started.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-12, 05:44 PM

I tend to delay Stealth over the weapon Talents, just because I always hate it when the game forces you out of it.

Stealth is my lowest priority, but a high steallth can be AMAZINGLY fun, because you can use items. "Ooops, looks like you all exploded for no reason whatsoever."

Although even elves fall for the charms of a French lesbian bard.

Hey! She's Bi!

... not that I have any proof. I don't think I've played a male character long enough to meet her. But I'm pretty sure she's bi!

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 05:57 PM

Maybe, the rumours I heard were that HC and HC used Redcliffe and Haven.

Didn't they make about 80% of Inquisition with the intent that the main character would be Hawke again and then have to hastily go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff?

That was the original intent, but I think it was dropped closer to DA2 being poorly received and the expansion being cancelled and replaced with a new human protagonist with variable origins.

Then the fans complained about the boring ears.

Stealth is my lowest priority, but a high steallth can be AMAZINGLY fun, because you can use items. "Ooops, looks like you all exploded for no reason whatsoever."

Stealth is great, but I prefer to grab a couple of tomes and rush up to 3 ranks at about level 10. The early game has a few too many points that deactivate it, including the Wilds encounter with all the traps.

Hey! She's Bi!

So people claim, but I've yet to see evidence. It's as ridiculous as the idea that Alastair is straight!

Errorname

2024-03-12, 06:10 PM

Maybe, the rumours I heard were that HC and HC used Redcliffe and Haven.

I think Barbarian was in the Frostback Mountains, but it wasn't Haven, although if you were going to try to reuse assets from an Avvar origin that'd be the place. But Commoner was Redcliffe, that's pretty apparent.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-12, 08:40 PM

Tried to play the Magi origin, remembered just how much it drags on, and then fled back to the comfort of City Elf. Dual wield rogue, of course, and murdering Vaughn for his deeds. The end result is a silver tongued thug with a lot of pent up anger and too many knives.

Trying to do a role play run where I wear clothing in civilised areas and don't change clothes in dangerous situations or in front of random NPCs. Honestly it shouldn't be that much of a challenge until I do Denerim.

Errorname

2024-03-12, 09:35 PM

Getting real annoyed at how everyone in this game keeps pronouncing Eamon as "Ee-mon"

NeptunianOM

2024-03-12, 09:50 PM

There was a sale on the eShop for Portal & Portal 2. I played the games in co-op with my friend but do not remember much of the game (other than having a blast with the mechanics). The game definitely holds up today, but that makes sense since it is a puzzle game. :smallbiggrin:

Errorname

2024-03-12, 10:25 PM

It's a shame that they didn't have the budget to make Jowan a party member, he's obviously written with the intent of letting you recruit him.

The Portal games really are something special. They're short and sharp, maybe Valve's best? Which is certainly saying something, those guys have put out some quality stuff over the years.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-13, 12:24 AM

Getting real annoyed at how everyone in this game keeps pronouncing Eamon as "Ee-mon"

I mean, yes strictly speaking that would be Æmon, but I don't expect an American game to remember that æ and exist.

Corlindale

2024-03-13, 10:48 AM

The Portal games really are something special. They're short and sharp, maybe Valve's best? Which is certainly saying something, those guys have put out some quality stuff over the years.

I love those games. I've played through Portal 1 five times, and it's a linear puzzle game, which should be the least replayable genre of all. But it's just so satisfying to use the portal mechanics.

Starbuck_II

2024-03-13, 12:59 PM

Dead Island 2 and Unicorn Overlord

In, Dead Island 2, Got to Hotel where I hope dude will create vaccine for zombies soon, but playing 1st and side game Riptide, I feel there will be a betrayal.

Rynjin

2024-03-13, 03:17 PM

I love those games. I've played through Portal 1 five times, and it's a linear puzzle game, which should be the least replayable genre of all. But it's just so satisfying to use the portal mechanics.

Y'all should really play Portal: Revolution. It's a fangame published on Steam, and it's completely free. Very fun too.

Zevox

2024-03-13, 05:57 PM

Whew, well, finally finished up Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth today, and oh boy, where to start.

Overall impression: it's an excellent game. The combat in Remake was already, in my opinion, the best action-RPG combat system in any game I've played, wonderfully blending the elements of both gameplay styles into an exciting, fun to play package, and Rebirth just took that and made it better. Most characters (Red XIII being the exception) do not suffer from the problem Remake had with flying enemies anymore, and while they took a while for me to even remember they were there since they're a whole new mechanic, the new synergy skills/abilities definitely add a lot of fun new options to the game (sometimes quite powerful ones - Cloud's projectile counter stands out there, for instance). A lot of the new special abilities characters got that weren't in Remake were great, too. I very much approve of them adding "Install" type moves to most characters (Prime Mode on Cloud, Bonus Round on Barret, Unfettered Fury on Tifa, Doppleganger on Yuffie), and Aerith's Radiant Ward in particular I should call out as pretty much single-handedly making her exponentially more fun to play than she was in Remake, as it changes her basic attack to something much faster and more impactful, and gives her an actual dodge worth a damn, at least while she stays within the ward's radius. The invincibility while casting spells part is almost an afterthought compared to that, despite sounding like the selling point when you first read the ability. Red XIII is an interesting new addition; he wound up being probably my second least-played character, but that's mostly because he has a more defensive play style that doesn't necessarily mesh with how I want to play; mechanically though, he's well handled aside from being the one character in the cast who still doesn't seem to have an answer to flying enemies that doesn't involve spending ATB. Cait Sith... well, frankly I played so little with him that I may not be the best judge of whether he was well handled mechanically. He's weird, which is appropriate for the character, but between that and me not liking the character to begin with I just did not want to bother using him.

Story-wise, without getting into spoilers, the main story is quite well told and dialogue is well-written. They definitely make you like these characters. And despite the "Unknown Journey" part of the tagline and the big deal the ending of Remake made about ending fate's hold on it, it doesn't actually change that much from the original story, and what it does change doesn't affect any major plot points. It puts in some effort to improve on flaws in the original - i.e. more properly integrating Yuffie and Vincent into the plot, or making Yuffie and Cait Sith joining the party make more sense - and most of what I'd personally point to as flaws in it are a part of the original themselves (i.e. Cait Sith). There are some other changes for pacing reasons, and some that add interesting new elements to the story that just don't affect the plot on a grand scale (in this game at least), but I kind of went into it expecting bigger divergences, honestly, as the ending of Remake seemed to set up at least a couple.
In particular, Zack has still done basically jack squat. He helps with the final fight, kind of, but ends up back in his own timeline, with nothing having changed with him and having impacted the main timeline not at all since Cloud could probably have just handled that part of the fight anyway. With him being displayed just as prominently on the cover art of the game as Cloud, plus the opening of the game revealing he has his own moveset that's completely distinct from Cloud's, I was expecting to be jumping into his timeline to actually do things that would later impact the main timeline somehow, but nope. He takes care of Aerith and Cloud's comatose bodies, talks to Elmyra, Marlene, and Biggs, and gets dragged into the final fight at the end, and that's it.

The theories I alluded to in prior posts about what they'd do with Zack's timeline were as follows: having seen that the second and third Zack scenes seemed to treat Aerith in his timeline as comatose rather than dead, and seemed to establish some connection between the main timeline characters and their alternate timeline selves (Cloud saw through the eyes of his alternate self and heard Zack's voice when going to sleep at the Golden Saucer), I thought a likely scenario was that when Aerith died at the end of Rebirth, she'd awaken in the alternate timeline, with her memories of the main timeline intact. Then she, Zack, and probably Biggs since he was alive in that timeline would need to do someting in the third game which would ultimately help the main timeline team defeat Sephiroth. Particularly because they established that Aerith's Holy Materia had been drained by the Whispers in the main timeline, but was still intact in Zack's alternate timeline.

I was sort of on the right track, except the actual ending went way more over the top and balls-to-the-wall bonkers than I was expecting. Aerith and Cloud do somehow wake up in Zack's timeline after the events at the Temple of the Ancients (no idea how that worked, it is not explained at all, aside from being implied to be Aerith's doing), had a little date there in which it was obvious that Aerith knew she's going to die soon (I guess that memory of the future was the only one the Whispers left her after Remake) and was just getting a last bit of fun time in with Cloud before the end, and Aerith handed him the Holy Materia, which he then somehow gave back to her in the main timeline in exchange for the empty one in a just as ill-explained sequence. Then the real ending hits and Sephiroth basically explains that the Whispers' defeat at the end of the first game created a lot of alternate timelines, most of which die off quickly, but all of which were converging in a "Reunion" (because of course) during the ending. And that leads to the ending being wild.

To be fair to them, they do use this to great effect with Aerith's death scene. You actually initially see Cloud manage to stop Sephiroth's attack and save Aerith's life - only for the converging timelines to steal that from him, replacing his success with a timeline where Aerith was struck down, and shows her going instantly from kneeling in prayer to a pool blood on the ground. For anyone who was hoping she would be saved because they established things could change in this version, that has to have been gut-wrenching, and it was a way to potentially recapture the kind of impact the death originally had despite everyone knowing it's supposed to happen: straight-up show her being saved, give people a moment to process that, then snatch it away in a horrible instant. Kudos to them on that moment.

That said, they definitely made that ending more confusing than it needed to be. Having Aerith call the alternate timeline a dream, and the story title pop-up refer to you as being "in a dream" during it made me wonder if Zack's timeline wasn't an alternate timeline at all, up until Sephiroth's little explanation of multiple worlds arising from the defiance of fate. Showing Zack face multiple additional sequences like his original death sequence before that explanation from Sephiroth was also needlessly confusing. And oh boy, showing Aerith waking up after Cloud holds her dead body and says "wake up, Aerith" was a mistake for sure. The scenes thereafter get across that either Cloud's able to speak with her spirit at most, or he's hallucinating still being able to talk to her (he does that a lot for other things, after all), since everyone else continues to act as if she's dead and clearly doesn't see her where Cloud does, and even Cloud understands she can't stay with them anymore and is only "seeing them off." But oh boy introducing it that way made me worry for a minute that they really were undoing her death. Fortunately not though.

Anyway, getting back to Zack, yeah, doesn't seem like they had much for him to do in this one. The ending implies he could end up helping the main timeline again in the next game, but I sure hope he has more to do there, because if he just pops in for the Sephiroth boss fight again, it'll make bothering with this alternate timeline stuff seem pretty pointless in the end. Great use with Aerith's death aside, it definitely complicates things to a degree that needs some real payoff to justify.

The other notable changes compared to the original mostly revolved around the Weapons and Tifa. With the weapons, they show up earlier than before, with aquatic ones being shown in both the Corel and Gongaga reactors, and you learn that they're already actively fighting Sephiroth in the Lifestream. Which is kind of nice, they're kind of an afterthought in the original FF7, being introduced late in the game but only one actually being a fight during the plot, and they don't really do anything to protect the planet from Sephiroth and Meteor despite that being their supposed purpose. So a bit like with Yuffie and Vincent, they're working that plot element more properly into the story.

With Tifa they do something interesting: Sephiroth is actively trying to sow doubts in Cloud's mind about who Tifa is, encouraging him to believe he saw her die in Nibelheim five years ago, and disbelieve Tifa's claim of survival even after she shows him her scar from back then. He almost gets Cloud to kill her in the Gongaga reactor, in fact. Now at first I wasn't clear on why they were doing that - what was so important to Sephiroth about Tifa? But it came to me during the Gongaga scenes. Besides just that Sephiroth likes messing with Cloud (which he clearly does), Remake strongly implied he has knowledge of the future. Which means he knows about Tifa being the one who can put Cloud's mind back together after the events at the Northern Crater. If he drives a wedge between them - or better, gets Tifa killed - then Cloud will not be able to recover from that, and the one person who Sephiroth knows can beat him will no longer be an issue. I expect some more might come of this in the next game, but even in this one it helped give more characterization to Tifa and better establish and develop her and Cloud's relationship.

The other change worth noting is a pacing one: Cid shows up earlier, flying the party from Gongaga to Cosmo Canyon in the Tiny Bronco, and later to Nibelheim, and acting as a fast travel method during that period. The Tiny Bronco goes down and enters boat-mode on the way back to the Golden Saucer, so they basically cut out the trip to Rocket Town, which is probably a good call. The game's long enough as-is, and I don't see what the trip to Rocket Town would add to this one; they'll probably work it into the third game somehow instead, I'd wager. I will say it was slightly frustrating seeing Cid and Vincent basically join the party as far as the story was concerned but not be playable in this game, but honestly the party already feels quite large even without them. Only having three characters active at a time, one of whom is always Cloud outside of the combat simulator and arenas, kind of makes it hard to use everyone as-is, even if you're ignoring one completely like I did. While I look forward to seeing what they play like in the third game, I do wonder if they'll do anything about that; I know the three-character party was in the original, but maybe we could up it to four despite that? You really only needed to bother with three in the original game after all, since everyone's stats were more determined by materia than anything else, while in the Remakes everyone's quite unique and you want to vary the party. Eh probably wishful thinking I suppose.
My biggest criticism with the game is the one I've previously given: the open world stuff. In particular, Chadley's map-filler events. When the game started I was only really bothered with scanning Life Springs, but by the second half of the game, all of it besides the Protorelic events (which were all unique because that's basically a whole set of interconnected side-quests) bugged me and I did not want them around anymore, but the rewards for them were too great to ignore. You get to power up your summon materia, make a bunch of new materia you can't get any other way, gain party xp that's crucial to opening up new options in the folios, find new recipes for the transmuter, some of which are absolutely necessary for side-quests, learn enemy skills for that materia, and get bonus, pre-leveled materia from fights that open in Chadley's combat simulator. They give you a lot of incentive to do those things, and I kind of hate that, because they're repetitive filler to justify the oversized maps. Compared to Remake, I feel less enthused about replaying Rebirth as a result - I really do wish the game had been more like Remake in this sense, more linear and focused. Obviously it had to be more open than Remake since it doesn't all occur in one city, a world map of some sort was needed, but it didn't need to be this.

But the fact that I enjoyed the game as much as I did despite that is very much a mark of its quality. If this isn't the second-best game I play this year (after Persona 3 Reload, of course), I'll be astounded. And I'll still probably replay the game on hard difficulty shortly now that that's opened up, since I really enjoyed replaying Remake on hard and the difficulty works the same in this one; though it does sound like I'll be able to keep my progress on side-content when doing that, so that helps tremendously.

Witty Username

2024-03-13, 08:09 PM

Having dipped my toes into Starfield, it ain't bad. $70 good, hell nah, but it ain't bad. If you have gamepass or something take a gander at it, it feels like a midpoint between Fallout and Mass effect, or a more serious Outer Worlds (more serious than Outer Worlds isn't hard). Get the Dream Home and live your fantasy of ever owning property in your lifetime.

SerTabris

2024-03-13, 08:32 PM

In which case Dwarf Noble is far more involved than the Human Noble, who was implicitly kept out of politics.

Honestly if it wasn't for the creepily long arms on the female dwarf models I'd be doing a DC run. As it is I'll probably restart as a City Elf or Mage.

That's how I tend to feel; for one, I tend to feel more heroic opposing aristocracy, rule inherited by blood relation, and other such things than supporting a better form of it against a worse one. (One of the reasons my first game ended with Anora ruling alone is that one of the biggest arguments you get for Alistair is the whole bloodline thing, which does less than nothing for me.)

I tend to delay Stealth over the weapon Talents, just because I always hate it when the game forces you out of it.

It also has the best introduction to Duncan, where you can make slowly stronger threats of force to get him to leave (implicitly only restrained because other elves get first).

Although even elves fall for the charms of a French lesbian bard.

I found stealth movement too slow and I usually just got impatient with it before doing much of anything useful in stealth, honestly. But I can definitely go for that last one; for my CE Warden, she was always resistant to the whole idea of having to marry a man at all, and was quite happy to meet Leliana.

Hey! She's Bi!

... not that I have any proof. I don't think I've played a male character long enough to meet her. But I'm pretty sure she's bi!

Apparently, according to a Gaider interview I saw recently, this was a later alteration. Leliana was originally intended to be a lesbian, and Zevran was originally intended to be gay.

It's a shame that they didn't have the budget to make Jowan a party member, he's obviously written with the intent of letting you recruit him.

That would have given a nice, much more sensible way to get the Blood Mage specialization, too.

warty goblin

2024-03-13, 08:38 PM

I wouldn't say I found Starfield bad precisely, so much as another version of a game I got bored of 15 years ago. I really enjoyed Oblivion, played a ton of it, had a great time. Starfield feels exactly like a higher resolution Oblivion in space with guns. And I mean that in the worst way possible.

See, a lot of game series anymore have been running at least that long (I'm considering Bethesda Game as a series, which is perhaps indicative of the issue). But they actually reinvent and innovate and change and grow. I can launch any of nearly 30 years of Tomb Raider games at the tap of a button, and yeah the old ones feel old, but Tomb Raider 2012 is not using the same systems and toolset as turn of the century Tomb Raider. And then there's Starfield, using systems that feel like they haven't advanced or even just had basic improvements done on them in 15 years. Which is really crippling in a system driven genre like The Bethesda Game, because they definitely can't stand on narrative strength. The parts all work, they just feel like garbage, which I can forgive with Oblivion because they were doing some innovative and technically challenging stuff for the hardware but I ain't playing Starfield on the OG XBOX. I feel like they could manage a movement system that doesn't feel like navigating a drunk refrigerator on bad casters, and an inventory system that isn't a crime against UX at this point, you know?

Errorname

2024-03-13, 09:56 PM

Honestly I kind of wanted it to be more like the Outer Worlds. I have a mountain of criticisms of that game but it managed to hold my attention through to the end, where I burned out of Starfield fast.

I would agree that standing up against aristocrats and systems of nobility generally does feel a lot more heroic. I find characters who play the game of feudal politics very compelling, but they're generally not good or admirable people.

SerTabris

2024-03-13, 10:02 PM

That makes sense. I can certainly find them interesting as part of the cast, but too much of it as a lead and I hit the "wait, why do I care what these people do?" problem.

Lord Raziere

2024-03-13, 11:32 PM

Outer Worlds at least works on my PC and I actually like it besides because of its charm.

Starfield just shows me loading screens interspersed with slide show gameplay sometimes. I wish I could play it enough to get burnt out on it, because its just completely unplayable to me.

halfeye

2024-03-14, 09:02 AM

Outer Worlds at least works on my PC and I actually like it besides because of its charm.

Starfield just shows me loading screens interspersed with slide show gameplay sometimes. I wish I could play it enough to get burnt out on it, because its just completely unplayable to me.

I'm guessing, but that sounds like a GPU problem unless you're trying to run it on a ras pi. Not that I've bought or tried to play it.

warty goblin

2024-03-14, 09:37 AM

Starfield absolutely requires a SSD to be playable. As soon as you leave the opening mine, it turns into a glitchy, weird slideshow on a HDD.

Once you put it on a SSD, then you meet the real final boss, the loading screens, which, alas, no hardware can solve because they're baked into that stegasaurus of a game engine. The last time I saw so many loading screens was Neverwinter Nights 2.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-14, 10:51 AM

Apparently, according to a Gaider interview I saw recently, this was a later alteration. Leliana was originally intended to be a lesbian, and Zevran was originally intended to be gay.

See, if you told me that she was canonically lesbian, I'd believe it. But as flaming as he is, I would always be willing to peg (lol) Zevran as being at least a bit bi... might prefer guys, but not object to getting his carrot wet where he could.

SerTabris

2024-03-14, 12:22 PM

Outer Worlds at least works on my PC and I actually like it besides because of its charm.

Starfield just shows me loading screens interspersed with slide show gameplay sometimes. I wish I could play it enough to get burnt out on it, because its just completely unplayable to me.

I mainly go for RPGs based on story interactions and characters, and while The Outer Worlds wasn't outstanding, it was pretty good with some particular bright points (Parvati), I thought. I haven't really heard much of anything about Starfield's story or NPCs, and I've never been all that big on non-story-directed exploration. Though, I suppose I don't really know if it's bad there, or if it's just not what the people who play it are interested in.

I was highly amused checking some stats for people writing fics on AO3, though. Of recent RPG releases, we have Baldur's Gate* at 22689, and Starfield at 288.

*It doesn't actually separate out BG3, so this is for all of the Baldur's Gate games. But I remember the numbers before BG3's release, and it's pretty safe to assume that the vast majority of that number is BG3.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-14, 12:45 PM

I'm guessing, but that sounds like a GPU problem unless you're trying to run it on a ras pi. Not that I've bought or tried to play it.

I don't know, some of us still have games on HDDs.

Zevran, Leliana, and Anders are clearly a 4-5 on the Kinsey Scale. Most bisexual characters in the series seem to be framed as preferring their own gender. Honestly I'd fully believe that Leliana was bisexual but hom*oromantic.

Alastair I'd peg as a bi man who never realized it was an option.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-14, 02:30 PM

Alastair I'd peg as a bi man who never realized it was an option.

If only he hadn't been raised by dogs.

SerTabris

2024-03-14, 03:58 PM

Alastair I'd peg as a bi man who never realized it was an option.

When they talk about it, generally yeah. Isabela's another great example. Characters like Merrill mostly just don't bring it up much, but while sometimes that's a disadvantage of the 'everyone is bi' approach I think for her it fits pretty well. (Fenris may also be in this category, I wouldn't know.)

And, it's sort of a shame for Alistair, and Morrigan, I think. I could definitely believe that for Alistair, and I feel like in general for different romance options the most plot-relevant ones are the ones it's most helpful to make bi unless there's a strong narrative reason why not. My first run, I was surprised that Morrigan only dated men, given how many bad things she had to say about men all the time. Though, Morrigan has some strange ideas in general; product of being raised by some hermit witch in the woods, I suppose.

Errorname

2024-03-14, 05:25 PM

My first run, I was surprised that Morrigan only dated men, given how many bad things she had to say about men all the time. Though, Morrigan has some strange ideas in general; product of being raised by some hermit witch in the woods, I suppose.

Given Morrigan's ultimate goal, I do think it makes sense for her to only be interested in men. It's actually one of the instances where the gender lock feels like it has a purpose, Morrigan's interest is transactional and if you can't participate in her ritual she's not interested.

SerTabris

2024-03-14, 06:07 PM

That part's true, though it's late enough that I remained somewhat confused about it until I was near the end of the game. Still, enough dialogue makes it feel like the opposite of what she actually wants that it seems like there might at least be some interesting conversations that could come up for a Warden who pushed a little.

warty goblin

2024-03-14, 06:27 PM

I continue to cleave slowly through Knight's Tale. Lancelot's recruitment mission was really, really savage. Sidhe everywhere, in really strong groups. This was the first mission I've really had to try multiple times, and a couple fights required very precise play and turn sequencing to power through, and even then I had to skip the side objectives, which had even harder groups. The Sidhe are really tough enemies, they move very fast, they hit extremely hard, and they have tons of really annoying abilities, like going invulnerable, or freezing everybody next to them when they die (causes a real problem in a melee focused game!) or how damn many stun attacks they have. The progression of enemies in this has been really good, the undead dudes have an annoying habit of getting back up three turns after you kill them, but are otherwise dumb and slow and don't do anything terribly overpowered, the Picts are faster, hit harder, and focus damage better, and the Sidhe are Picts on PCP who also cast ice storms.

On the upside, I think I've pretty much got my final set of knights at this point. I'll get Morgana le Fey as soon as I pick up a couple more Old Faith points, and I suspect there's one or two more in story missions, but that should be it. I think I'm also getting reasonably close to the end of Chapter 3, but I can't run the next story mission just yet, my A team is all off getting patched back together. And then I should level them up a bit more too.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-14, 07:22 PM

If only he hadn't been raised by dogs.

Hey now, Mabari are smart enough to like some good old universal loving!

Honestly I now want to see a queer fantasy CRPG.

IIRC Morrigan was originally intended as bi and had ways to get pregnant without Alastair.

Errorname

2024-03-14, 09:52 PM

IIRC Morrigan was originally intended as bi and had ways to get pregnant without Alastair.

Yeah, I'd heard that. It's less work than doing two very different romance paths would be, although I don't think I like it. I'll say that Dragon Age is one of the only game series I've played where I've approved of some of the choices for locking romances. Not all of them, mind, but something like Solas's romance being built around shared cultural history is really good and does not work without your Inquisitor sharing that. While I generally find locked romances frustrating, I do think it's something that good character writing can justify. Morrigan's kind of right on the line there, I'm kind of not sure how I feel about her romance.

Zevox

2024-03-14, 11:42 PM

FF7 Rebirth: Started on hard mode, already about done with the Grasslands. Thanks in no small part to the fact that even telling the game to reset my progress on side-quests does not reset my progress on Chadley's Filler, to which I say hallelujah! Resetting the side-quests is fun, they're mostly good (chicken-catching in Gongaga aside); resetting Chadley stuff would've been painful. Unfortunately it does mean that the Protorelic questline doesn't reset, since it's technically part of Chadley's stuff, which is a shame since most of those are legitimately fun - but worth it on the whole.

Unfortunately, there is a bit of a problem: the entire difficulty setting is balanced on the assumption you're at the game's max level, 70. I ended the game's normal run at 50. On the upside, the early parts of the game haven't been so rough due to that that I've been unable to progress, and I've been gaining levels rapidly due to everything being so much higher level than me (already at 60); on the downside, there's two fights that I'm struggling with because things just do too much damage even now, and one of them is the boss I need to beat to move on to the next area. So I fear I'm going to need to grind to get past that.

Dragon Ball FighterZ: Been sitting on this since the first couple of days after the PS5 version/rollback released, went back to try it further now that I've beaten Rebirth. Unfortunately, those issues I was having day 1 (disconnecting from the lobbies while matchmaking and needing to restart the game to get back into one) are still around though. I was entirely unable to get matches yesterday, and it's been spotty today. And in googling to see if Bandai Namco have said anything about addressing these issues (they haven't as far as I can tell), I came across this (https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1baiole/fighterz_next_gen_entirely_handled_by_bandai_no/?share_id=I6BSMxoyxtKtd3BZZbWhm&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1). Which, if true, would explain a lot, not just about the current issues, but basically how they've been handling the game since around the end of its third season of DLC several years ago. And sadly it might mean that something I'd taken as a given, that we'd surely see a sequel to the game, might not happen. :smallfrown:

DNF Duel: Just had a new character drop, the Monk, and while I'm not that interested in him, it's an excuse to jump into the game again to try the previous new DLC character I was interested in, Battle Mage, who just came out at a bad time (basically the same time Granblue Rising came out). She's fun, but wow, even the new DLC coming out is not bringing many people into play this game anymore sadly. I got a few matches in with one person, but then the lobby we were in was dissolved by the guy who set it up, booting everyone. I set up my own hoping some of those who had been in the room would come, but no dice, and when I backed out to see if someone else had set one up, they hadn't. Guess everyone was just done... between this and DBFZ's issues, I might be going back to Granblue sooner than I expected.

SerTabris

2024-03-15, 03:00 AM

Honestly I now want to see a queer fantasy CRPG.

In what sense? I'd generally agree, but I'm curious what sort of thing you're thinking of here.

IIRC Morrigan was originally intended as bi and had ways to get pregnant without Alastair.

I hadn't heard the first part, but had heard the second. Though now that I think about it, the second being true but the first not would seem pretty off.

I'd generally agree with that; I tend to think something like "if you're restricting your romance options, you need to do something narratively to make that worthwhile". Which most examples I've seen of it outside the Dragon Age series I don't think really manage.

Lurkmoar

2024-03-15, 09:43 AM

I finally gave New Vegas a shot on my Steam Deck after playing Fallout 3. Kinda wish I spent that time on New Vegas though.

More depth, more detail and thought put into just about everything. Really enjoying it. I only slightly prefer the music selection in FO3 though.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-15, 03:30 PM

...In which case Dwarf Noble is far more involved than the Human Noble, who was implicitly kept out of politics.

Because the Dwarven throne is elective by the noble oligarchy and 'head of House' [ie the person who gets the Assembly seat] has no firm order of succession. The DN is 'more involved' mainly because it's realistically possible that they [I]could snag the throne - their elder sibling [Trian] is merely a more credible candidate to be the 'Aeducan pick' after their father's death because they are older [and have had more time to find allies etc]. This is complicated by the fact that we never learn whether the trio all have the same mother - it is possible that the DN's maternal relatives might give them an edge that the other two don't have [esp if the DN is female, as they set stock in 'same sex parent' position etc].

The Human Noble doesn't have this 'realistic possibility' to snag the Teyrnir of Highever; their older sibling Fergus is heir apparent and he has a heir too. But this doesn't mean they are 'being kept out of politics', more that they don't have an obvious path and don't really get much chance in the prologue to voice their views on that. And they are already being involved; both Rendon Howe and the HN's mother raises the prospects of a marriage with another noble scion which would have had dynastic/alliance elements to it.

...I find the dynamics of feudal politics pretty interesting and I do enjoy when an RPG lets you play those games as an insider.

Except Origin kinda fluffs it with a 'Human Noble'; the moment the HN finds out Cailan's dead Loghain's plan becomes clear; to usurp the throne. King Cailan is dead due to Loghain's 'strategy', along with a large % of Ferelden nobility. Howe wipes out the only other Teyrn [and claimants], save Fergus, who is presumed dead from a scouting mission which would have been planned by Loghain. The only other possible candidate [Arl Eamonn] was poisoned by Jowan at Howe's instigation, leaving a scared and decimated Landsmeet with no 'organising force' to oppose Loghain's claim. Alistair's reveal offers another possible; that Loghain had planned for him [and the HN] to die at the Tower of Ishal , leaving the field completely clear for his crown.

Even putting that aside, Morrigan's lock makes sense. She likes power, and Flemeth taught her how to read/use men, as well as 'how to lie' and 'how to work magic'. Of all the romance options, she is the only one which leaves you doubting whether she [I]genuinely loved the Warden, even right at the end [and maxed out]. It's possible attraction had zero to do with it; just she had no idea how to read/use another woman in that way.

Errorname

2024-03-15, 10:21 PM

The Human Noble is pretty clearly conforming to the expectations of a second child. They're trusted with the responsibility of managing Highever while their relatives are away at war, and yeah there's definitely the prospect of them getting married off to another family soon, both of which are part of dynastic politics. It just doesn't feel as political because while all the Dwarf Noble's peers and family are backbiting pricks where the Couslands are all basically saints. That makes sense given where the antagonists of their stories are (DN is betrayed by their family while HN seeks to avenge theirs) but the former is obviously more interesting.

Except Origin kinda fluffs it with a 'Human Noble'; the moment the HN finds out Cailan's dead Loghain's plan becomes clear; to usurp the throne.

I think it's hit by how the dynastic politics of Ferelden are pretty disconnected from the politics of the Mages, Dalish and Dwarves. It's the most prominent and important of those political situations, but there's still a lot of game (and a lot of PC origins) that are not directly connected to the dynastic games of the Banns and Arls.

So it's definitely simplified. I think it's okay, Loghain is more complex than your usual wicked uncle, but you could absolutely do better if you wanted to make dynastic politics a focus of your RPG.

that Loghain had planned for him [and the HN] to die at the Tower of Ishal [it was his forces guarding it], leaving the field completely clear for his crown.

I don't think Loghain planned for Alistair to be at the Tower of Ishal, I think he wanted him to die with Cailan and Duncan. I don't want to say Cailan sending Maric's other heir to the Tower singlehandedly threw a spanner into Loghain's plan, Alistair still very much would have died without Flemeth's intervention, but it was a good play and the thing that would have ruined it (the darkspawn attacking the tower) probably wasn't known to Loghain either.

NeoVid

2024-03-16, 03:36 AM

I'd like to mention what I'm playing *with* right now, since my old 360 controller was finally giving out after 10+ years and needed a replacement. After some frustrating searching as I tried to find anyone who still makes wired controllers, I ran across something unexpected. Since I'd last looked, there was a development of something called Hall Effect controllers, which never get stick drift. I got one, and it's a damn good controller so far, though I figure it'll be a few years before I can tell if it's really resistant to developing drift. In a handy bonus I didn't notice until I used it, they've finally figured out a useful place to put a couple of extra buttons on a controller, right where your middle fingers usually rest with a standard grip. Sadly, I haven't yet encountered a game that realizes these buttons exist, or lets me reconfigure the controls enough to use them. Ah well.

As for games I'm playing, I'm doing my usual of finally trying major games ten years after they released, and just got Horizon Zero Dawn. I was a bit surprised by the lack of polish about a lot of aspects of the game, but the concept and setting is as good as I always heard. Still in the early part of the storyline, since I'm doing my usual thing in sandbox games and getting caught up in every single side thing I encounter. I had a fair amount of the truth about the setting spoiled for me back in the day, but I've forgotten enough of it by now that there are still plenty of surprises.

Errorname

2024-03-16, 04:39 AM

Onto the Brecilian Forest, and it's really striking me how out of place the Werewolves and Sylvans feel. These are not elements that later games built on, you could probably count the callbacks on one hand. Like I get why these were not a priority to bring back, they're very stock fantasy and the implementation is not terribly useful, it's made very clear that the baseline for both is aggressive monster and it makes them largely redundant with the Demons and Abominations that have stronger connections to the plots the writers care about, but the end result is that this questline is built around a bunch of elements that the franchise largely discarded afterwards.

Cygnia

2024-03-16, 12:20 PM

Finished a couple adorable cat-oriented games: "Cat & Onion" and "Meow Moments" and picked up Oxenfree II and Widower's Sky with the recent Steam sale. Meanwhile, "The Sexy Brutale" is still remaining unplayed after the tutorial...

Form

2024-03-16, 01:16 PM

I've just finished Lies of P. It took a few hours before I got into it (pretty normal for me), but it's a decent souls-like. I used the bone-cutting saw blade + exploding pickaxe handle because it came recommended. It's got a powerful swing and the pickaxe handle gives it some extra reach and it's juuuust fast enough to get in a decent swing before getting clobbered yourself. There are probably a lot more combination I could have tried, but I didn't want to spend too much time experimenting instead of just getting on with the game. Still, points for novelty. Can't say I used the legion arms much or very well, though, except that one boss fight I suppose.

I half regret calling in a specter to help me with the King of Puppets (the specter made that fight way easier), but that guy was really kicking my ass. Well, at least I did kill the other bosses by myself.

The writing falls apart a bit here. Simon Manus was ranting about the next stage of human evolution and about creating a world without lies and about becoming a god and there are some bits of lore indicating he could read people's minds, but they didn't really build up towards any of that. It feels like they just took a couple of visionary villain tropes and mushed them together without much thought. I'm just going to interpret that as Simon eating Ergo and that really messing up his mind.

I might give it a second, partial playthrough. I've tried the Frozen Feast weapon a little, but it feels verrrry slow. I'm going to try the coil stick instead and see how a faster weapon feels.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-16, 04:20 PM

I've paused just after Ostagar, but yes. Honestly I suspect that's because the writers of DAO wanted to focus on the city elves and thus the human/dalish relationship focused on in other games in underdeveloped.

Went back to my Dalish rogue run, mostly because a) city elves have pretty good reasons not toput Anora on the throne, which I want to do, and b) I want to see if there's any special dialogue options when in the Alienage in the endgame. Which means redoing the end of Ostagar, but I'm fine with that.

Trying to spend as much time as possible in the OG Dalish Armour, because while Origins having sex-based light armour was bad enought the Dalish set is in a weird place where the bikini armour isn't more fanservicey, it just does it differently from the other sets.

Errorname

2024-03-16, 06:53 PM

Honestly I suspect that's because the writers of DAO wanted to focus on the city elves and thus the human/dalish relationship focused on in other games in underdeveloped.

Eh, it's not that the Brecilian stuff isn't developed, it's that it's developing concepts that the later games mostly drop. Like there's stuff going on in the Brecilian forest, it's just that none of it ever comes back. And there is important foundational stuff happening with the Dalish, the Eluvians are a big deal and Merrill becomes a companion in the next game, but none of that factors into the Brecilian quests at all. It's not the only instance of Dragon Age Origins showing the symptoms of writers who are still getting a feel for what they want to do with this setting, but it sticks in my memory a bit.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-16, 07:12 PM

Yeah, all the Dalish stuff that becomes important is in the Origin, although it's also rough (notably Eluvians are stated to be Tewinter, not Elvhen). The main Dalish questline is a really weird take on the Dalish/human conflict going for a sins of the few impacting the many thing, I suspect if it was written with the current direction of the series in mind it would have been a village of humans harbouring an old feud.

Reinstalled NWN:EE to mess around with the toolset, which doesn't work on my laptop, so I'll try it again another time. But I did use it as an eexcuse to have another go at ADWR, which has some moments early on that are quite unfair (I'm looking at you sewers!).

Zevox

2024-03-17, 09:56 PM

Very much enjoying doing FF7 Rebirth on hard difficulty. Having done a little grinding to get to level 70 (didn't take too long, you get a ton of xp on this mode), I was able to pass the boss that I was struggling with and move on - though it still took several attempts. Every major boss so far has taken at least two, in fact, which is kind of nice. None have become a major slog that's taken a ton of attempts, they're just challenging enough that I'll need to learn the fight notably better than I did on normal, which is good balancing for a mode like this IMO, makes the fights very satisfying.

I'm now on Chapter 7, Corel, so roughly halfway through the game. Having Chadley's Open-World Filler already done does wonders for the game's pacing, oh my gods it's so nice being able to just ignore all of that and get on with it. Do side-quests until I run out, then on with the story. It's still just as true to me a decade and a half later as it was back when I was first trying Bethesda games: open-world game design generally just drags games down for me. This one's lucky it has such an excellent combat system and good storytelling and characters to carry it the first time around.

Well, I also redo Queen's Blood matches, because that's fun. Plus it turns out that Queens Blood players either get beefed up on hard difficulty, or just scale as you rank up (I never went back and redid matches on normal, could be either or), because I've been finding everyone has better decks and makes better plays than before. I'm still winning easily most of the time, especially since I put together a new deck after starting hard mode that seems to be quite powerful now that I've got the hang of it, but the upped difficulty was pretty obvious when even Crybaby Ned from Kalm is dropping replacement cards and actually trying to steal my claimed spaces like he has a clue what he's doing. And I have had to do a couple of matches more than once to get the win too, so that's nice. Should probably experiment some more with more new decks, I've got almost all the cards in the game now (just need that Bahamut card from the hardest Golden Saucer challenge to complete the collection), so I can pretty much do whatever I feel like.

Sermil

2024-03-18, 12:22 AM

I'm playing Cobalt Core on the Switch.

Description

Cobalt Core is fundamentally Slay the Spire but in spaceships. Similar action-cards-limited-by-energy fights, similar blocking-vs-damage cards tradeoffs, and a very similar map -- 3 maps with branching paths, with some tough enemies with artifact rewards, some repair shops (campfires), some ? squares, a bunch of normal enemies, all leading to a boss fight to get to the next area.

There are two main innovations:

First is positioning. It's a little like a 1-D Into the Breach. Enemies move and declare their attacks, and then you can spend a resource called Evade to move left or right to limit damage or to line up your cannon. Most ships have weak sections (extra damage) and armored sections (less damage). Since Evade carries over from turn to turn, there's some risk/reward -- do I burn 1 Evade to avoid 1 shield damage, or just let the shield take it? I have a really strong attack card but the enemy is 4 spaces left of my cannon -- do I burn all my Evade, making me a sitting duck next turn, so I can play the attack? There's also a midrow with drones or asteroids or missiles which you can move with a resource called Droneshift, making missiles miss you or lining up an asteroid to block an enemy shot or making sure your attack drone will hit the enemy's weak point.

The other is that you don't play a single character, you play a three (out of eight) person crew on one of five ships. Each character tends to have a particular theme: Dizzy is the shield specialist, Riggs is the Evade specialist, Peri tends to do direct damage, Isaac is the drone/midrow specialist, and so on. So instead of just playing "the Watcher" or "The Silent" which tend to always start the same, you can play Dizzy, Riggs, and Peri on the Ares one time and Dizzy, Riggs, and Isaac on the Gemini the next time for a somewhat different experience even at the start.

The third difference is that Cobalt Core actually tries to have a little story, as opposed to Slay the Spire, which just kinda gestures in the direction of one. There's a clear goal instead of just trying to go up ever-more ascensions.

My take

Overall, fun. I keep saying I'll put it down, but then I keep playing. Still, it doesn't have the depth of Slay the Spire.

The crew choice gives a noticeable amount of variety, especially at the beginning of runs, but it also has downsides. Since each character's deck is now only a third of your possible cards, there's a lot less strategic depth to each. Unlike Slay the Spire where you can discover multiple deep, hard-to-complete but super-powerful combos, there's only really one or two strategies for each character. The other downside is most of the defensive stuff is in the decks of Dizzy (shields) and Riggs (evasion). So for 4 of the 5 ships, you almost have to take at least one of those two.

From a story point-of-view, though, the 3 crew does allow the crew to banter among themselves, giving them a little more personality. Like Slay the Spire, you're coming for the gameplay not the story, but still, it's nice for your characters to have a little chance to become more than icons.

There're also two issues with pacing, which felt like the developers never really went back and thought about how the game looks before the "everything is unlocked" phase. The first is that, when you start the game, it drops you immediately into a run on the lowest difficulty -- which is called Normal but come on, it's Easy. If you are paying any attention, you can defeat the "final" boss on your first run. The game isn't over (you have to unlock 18 memories for the real ending -- 3 for each of 6 crew members -- and you unlock one per defeat of the "final" boss), but still -- as opposed to Slay the Spire, where you kept seeing new and interesting things your first several hours into the game, as you gradually got good enough to make it through more of the 3 maps, cruising through the map and killing the "final" boss on your first run feels like a little bit of a letdown.

The other is kinda specific, but to unlock a ship called the Gemini, you need to win one run without Dizzy, Riggs, or Peri. The problem is that, normally, the first point you can unlock the Gemini is when you have Isaac, Drake, and Max. Isaac, Drake, and Max are a horrible crew choice -- they don't synergize well. In particular, they don't have almost any defensive skills and tend to get murdered in most ships. There's one ship, the Tiderunner, which could probably win with that set of people, but I hadn't unlocked the Tiderunner yet at the time I got Max. The correct answer is to wait to unlock the 7th character (Books) and the Tiderunner -- but how do I know that? I wanted to get the new unlock, so I tried to win with Isaac, Drake, and Max over. And over. And over. It was a huge frustrating wall of no progress. Plus, I generally dislike Max's deck, and losing with him over and over didn't improve my opinion of him. I finally happened to unlock Books and managed to win with Isaac, Drake, and Books, but it was real low point in the game.

On high points: The Tiderunner. I love the Tiderunner. The Tiderunner's big trick is that playing the leftmost card in your hand moves the Tiderunner left, and playing the rightmost card in your hand moves the Tiderunner right. Obviously the ship can be a gamble, but overall, it's way more maneuverable than the other ships. And, it's the only ship you can really play without Dizzy or Riggs, so it's nice to have that change. But the reason I love the Tiderunner is that it's super-powerful if you are willing to really pay attention, but it punishes you severely for inattention. You have to count cards, figure out exactly where you want to end up, and really think through how you are going to end up there. Playing cards in the wrong order will end up with you taking serious damage -- and the Tiderunner has fewer shields and less hull than the other ships. But it really rewards careful play.

Other points: I'm playing on the Switch because I want a lay-in-bed game, but I do miss mouse and keyboard. In particular, I've lost at least two runs because I hit Y (end turn) when I meant to hit B (flip card) -- a mouse where the end turn button was further away from the other controls would be nice. And one time, an accidental brush against the touchscreen played a card I didn't want to. Other than that, it runs fine on the Switch -- if you're not the sort of person who mixes up buttons, it will be fine.

Corlindale

2024-03-18, 02:45 AM

I've been reading interesting things about Cobalt Core as well, as I'm a huge Slay the Spire-fan but haven't quite found anything else to scratch that particular itch. Maybe one for the birthday list.

I've been playing what I always play when I'm a bit between games: Tales of Maj'Eyal. I don't want to jinx it, but I think I'm finally on course for my first victory on Nightmare difficulty after dozens of failed attempts. Tried out a Gunslinger in the Embers of Rage campaign (a steampunk-themed expansion) and despite feeling meh about that class in the past, I have to say it really comes into its own once you get some nice gear and the right skills. Turns out the skill that enchants your ammunition to explode combines extremely well with AoE abilities like Static Shot. In effect it makes every enemy in the blast radius detonate with its own explosion, meaning that with tightly packed groups you get a cascade of overlapping blasts. Extremely satisfying and very deadly. Still have to be careful as the Gunslinger does not have a ton of defensive abilities, but I've been stacking life and life regen quite a bit, and I'm trying to play less recklessly compared to my usual style. I've reached the entrance to the final dungeon, although I may delay it a bit to do the various optional areas.

zlefin

2024-03-18, 09:33 AM

There's an amusing tavern brawl in hearthstone, it's another of those weird special ones rather than a fight. In this particular one it's setup as a quiz, where you have to match a set of card images and their card texts with the names, you get 14 cards to identify and about 22-ish card names to work with. Though it might be hard for people who haven't been following the whole time, as there are a lot of cards. Sometimes though you can guess based on patterns in the names, as there are a lot of those. It was neat and different at any rate.

Got Civ 6 at long last, only the base game, not the dlc, but i've been enjoying it, it's different enough to be cool to explore for now. I find it interesting how it's the first civ in quite awhile I've played where there really is lots of spare unused land that last awhile, because it's not that worth overexpanding due to scaling costs rather than due to crippling happiness debuffs. You can expand heavily, it's just not that effective. It feels a bit 'gamier', especially for the city-states, not quite as much living breathing world as civ 5 (not that that was high in that regards either). The combat system does continue to feel better balanced, or at least would be if the ai wasn't even more inept at warfare than in 5. It does feel like you don't get to customize your civ quite as much as I'd like for each game; the card system for bonuses especially, since you get to change it so often. It's only really the government choices which heavily vary from game to game, well that and which city state bonuses you get.

I've also been making some modest progress on the ol' king's bounty armored princess. Still a fun game, maybe i'll actually manage to finish one :) I always tend to peter out on them in the late game, as your character build changes less and less in the late game, and the fights start taking longer, also your army comp varies less over time. Mostly it's that some zones are a bit too large; I prefer the smaller zones because it means you get to shift focus more often.

Sermil

2024-03-18, 12:12 PM

Whenever my wife watched me play that, she insisted the title should be King's Bounty: The Quest for Some Clothes.

tyckspoon

2024-03-18, 01:04 PM

This also gets pretty silly with any of the ammunitions that have area effect special on-hit effects using either Static Shot or the piercing ammunition enhancement to a similar result - shoot through a line of five enemies, set off 5 separate ice bursts or exploding fires or windbursts or whatever. Gunslinger in general really likes procs/bonus on-hit effects due to their very high capacity to just dump attacks onto things.

Good luck with the final boss - I recall that one being quite challenging as a Gunslinger due to being nearly impossible to take down in one ability cycle and putting a lot of pressure on your Steam reserves to be able to keep using your special shots. Although I think that was also my first Embers of Rage run to get there and probably half of it was thanks to not knowing the fight gimmick. (Which I have since forgotten so I still don't know the fight gimmick.)

Zevox

2024-03-18, 03:54 PM

Also, I gotta say you are really selling me on those FFVII remakes, Zevox. I'm planning to get a PS5 soon, and I am starting to think they should be my first games. I really miss the experience of playing a genuinely good Final Fantasy game, as I was a bit meh about XII, bounced off XIII and didn't really like the looks of either XV or XVI. I also never finished the original VII back in the day, as my disc got scratched and blocked my progress, so would be lovely to see the story through in a modern package.
I'd definitely recommend them, obviously. I can say from experience that FF7 Remake works well even if you've never played the original, since I'd only gotten partway through it (maybe 25-30%-ish) on my one attempt prior to Remake, and I barely remembered anything from that attempt at the time anyway. Rebirth I can't say the same from experience, since after Remake I both went and played the original in full and played the re-release of Crisis Core (which is basically a prequel game). I do think there's more in Rebirth that assumes some level of knowledge of the original story for full effect than in Remake, but you're probably mostly fine assuming you know of the most famous moment from the original. Which I'd bet you do, I certainly knew it long before even my first try at playing the original, since it's right up there with "Snape kills Dumbledore" and "Rosebud is the sled" in terms of famous spoilers. (Both of which are also from things I've never seen/read, come to think of it.)

Corlindale

2024-03-18, 04:39 PM

Yeah, I'm getting the feeling that I'm only just scratching the surface of the interactions you can play with. I haven't really used the piercing ammunition much (I'm so lazy that I've just set Combustive Shots to auto-use when I spot an enemy), but it does sound like there's potential there as well.

I worry a bit about the final boss too. I've beaten it twice on Normal. Once with an Oozemancer which was slooow and once with an Annihilator where I felt like it was just obliterated. But I don't really remember its main gimmick either, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I'd definitely recommend them, obviously. I can say from experience that FF7 Remake works well even if you've never played the original, since I'd only gotten partway through it (maybe 25-30%-ish) on my one attempt prior to Remake, and I barely remembered anything from that attempt at the time anyway. Rebirth I can't say the same from experience, since after Remake I both went and played the original in full and played the re-release of Crisis Core (which is basically a prequel game). I do think there's more in Rebirth that assumes some level of knowledge of the original story for full effect than in Remake, but you're probably mostly fine assuming you know of the most famous moment from the original. Which I'd bet you do, I certainly knew it long before even my first try at playing the original, since it's right up there with "Snape kills Dumbledore" and "Rosebud is the sled" in terms of famous spoilers. (Both of which are also from things I've never seen/read, come to think of it.)

Good to know, sounds very promising. Yes, I do know the thing you are talking about despite never reaching that point in the game. It's one of those famous spoilers that's hard to avoid.

Sapphire Guard

2024-03-18, 07:33 PM

Forspoken It's competent and has potential, and wandering around literally looking at the scenery was quite nice. The final boss has good design, a good name, and an interesting backstory I want to know more about, but given the reviews, we'll probably never know. I want to know more about the lore, but probably not enough to actually try hunting it all.

Also, Wo Long grew on me in the end. I was consistently underlevelled, which suits me fine, the toughest fight was the first Lu Bu fight, but once you get through that you know the combat system and the rest comes together. Level 71 for the final fight, and it only took me a few attempts. I'm not super skilled, so the devs must have been being fairly generous. Notably, there is a fight with a dragon at one point where the difficulty seemedf to shift depending on how well you did with the previous fight, unless that was just me.

Many of the characters are actual historical figures, but I can't remember enough about them to wreck the experience. Had trouble remembering who everyone was.

Villain's plot is straightforward and works well, he hands elixir to warlords that are in a tough spot to cause chaos while he does research. Eventually runs out of warlords and has to start forciblty converting your allies, but then the lead discovers how to heal that so he has to take a hand. Makes sense. Shame we lost Lu Bu, though.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-19, 12:20 AM

I had a way better time with Forspoken than the internet hate would lead you to expect. It's got some interesting ideas and I actually enjoyed most of the writing. It certainly feels rough and unfinished in spots, but it was worth a playthrough.

Errorname

2024-03-19, 12:33 AM

A thing I was struck with is that a lot of dialogue in Forspoken would have been completely inoffensive and even mildly charming with less effort put into the presentation.

There are a lot of lines that are fine as off-the-cuff barks, which get entire cutscenes of the characters standing still and blankly talking while the camera slowly pans. They're interrupting the gameplay for cutscenes that do not merit the interruption.

Rynjin

2024-03-19, 12:39 AM

I guess it helps if you haven't been over-exposed to the type of dialogue Forspoken has. I've thought it was lame for a while now, personally. Just everybody trying to be "witty" or "quippy" but utterly failing and landing on "awkward" instead.

Zevox

2024-03-19, 12:54 AM

I thought Forspoken had fun combat - I wish there were more such games with action combat applied to a mage - and there's something to be said for parts of its setting, at least visually.

Story-wise, well, Frey was a good character. The rest of it was pretty eh, and it clearly got incredibly rushed after the second Tanta, with the ending in general being a mess. Which is especially bad considering it had multiple delays, coming out something like a year and a half later than it was originally supposed to...

Mr Blobby

2024-03-19, 06:05 AM

Yeah, I could sense a lot of unsaid stuff when HN's father is briefing them; basically 'if we both die at Ostagar, it's up to you to be the regent for your nephew and hold it all together'. It also feels 'political' when Bryce slaps down Howe for bad-mouthing Cailan; with hindsight, that might have been the final test - that if they'd agreed 'yes, Cailan is unsuitable' they might have hit the abort button.

Improvisation. The moment Cailan says 'send Alistair to the tower' [note it's Alistair by name], Loghain hears 'get my bastard heir presumptive out of the firing-line'. So he pulls the guards off the Tower, esp the ones trying to secure the 'basem*nt tunnels' found earlier. He might even consider that the bastard being stuck in a tower with darkspawn swarming outside an even better situation than them being on a collapsing front line in a pinch-point - because the latter has the chance of survival [after all, both Aveline and Carver did] while the former has none.

...Went back to my Dalish rogue run, mostly because a) city elves have pretty good reasons not toput Anora on the throne, which I want to do, and b) I want to see if there's any special dialogue options when in the Alienage in the endgame...

There isn't. Not even Valendrian or Alarith [a pair who you'd expect to acknowledge it] don't bat an eyelid. I was kinda sad there wasn't an angry 'how [redacted] dare you suggest I sell flat-ears as slaves!' option to Caladrius - or even being able to tear a strip off Zevran afterwards ['you think I needed to be reminded about how slavery is bad?'] when he does a 'look at their eyes before you agree to the deal' line at you. This general 'lack of acknowledgement' through the whole game of Origins makes me suspect that the Dalish origin was added relatively late [the other one I suspect being Elf Mage].

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-19, 08:02 AM

It's a shame, but I remember being a city elf having similar issues. Part of me suspects the game was originally written with HN and HM in mind and then a few 'you're an elf's were sprinkled in.

From what they've set up most quest givers should be dismissive of an elf warden.

Anyway, my external hard drive died and so once my new SSD arrives I can get into more modern stuff!

....

(Boots up Dragon Age.)

Batcathat

2024-03-19, 08:28 AM

Maybe I'm misremembering, but my impression wasn't so much that some origins got less attention than others and more that the origins generally didn't really change that much of the game once they were finished.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-19, 08:38 AM

The 'default elf' lines are for a city elf, from my guess . Loghain is a bit better; he gets the difference between 'elven derelict' [City Elf] and 'wild elf' [Dalish] but an elven Mage comes under the former.

If I remember right, the Elf Mage gets exactly [I]one conversation which admits their 'double minority' status [Eadric, the elf-mage in the Circle library in the Origin story]. There's a couple of bits which I think deserved a bit of 'elf-fleshing out'; the Arcane Warrior phylactery was the spirit of an ancient elf [but the elf-Warden wasn't curious?] nor could they point out to Wynne that perhaps her first apprentice [Aneirin] might have been better-placed with an elven mentor, or at least a human one who was more sympathetic to the myriad of injustices they'd suffered at human hands [esp as the City Elf comes from the same alienage as him, and how did that work out?].

And while yeah, the origin doesn't change that much the main quests afterwards, but each of them get their 'business and personal' quests - both dwarves get Orzammar, the HN gets the 'Arl of Denerim' and so on. However, as there are effectively five different 'combat styles' [Mage, archer, dual-wield, single-handed/shield and double-handed], four different romantic partners [five if you count 'none'] and six Origins [human-mage and elf-mage are effectively identical] you can effectively play the same game five times significantly differently.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-19, 12:38 PM

That sucks, I'm supposed to be viewed as the evil elf of the woods who kidnaps bad children and sacrifices them to their dread gods. Heck the Dalish Elf Origin gets this right with the brief scene with what I assume is one of the elves who ran away from the City Elf's wedding (the Dalish implicitly being one of the later Origins).

Am I really going to run through Ostagar a third time just to play an elven mage?

... at least the game doesn't expect mages to invest in the intelligence stat. Would be nice if the gameplay followed the lore in Oirigins and made Willpower an important stat for mages, but you can't have everything.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-19, 04:46 PM

Tattoo + Arcane Warrior + Spellweaver + Ancient Elven Armour? Your Elf-Mage might not be Dalish but hell, you'd be the elven hero they'd like to have.

Errorname

2024-03-19, 04:51 PM

Is there any evidence that Loghain engineered / allowed the Darkspawn attack on the Tower of Ishal, or is that just pure headcanon?

Zevox

2024-03-19, 06:11 PM

Hi-Fi Rush released on Playstation today, and I've picked it up - but not started playing it yet. I think I'll finish my FF7 Rebirth hard mode run first. Which is a testament both to how much I'm enjoying the game, and how much faster it's going the second time around, when I can just bypass all the open-world elements, because I had fully expected to set Rebirth aside for a bit when Hi-Fi Rush dropped, since I'm quite eager to play it.

Also playing a little DBFZ here and then, when the game cooperates with me and gets me matches anyway. When it does, it works pretty well and I enjoy it. Getting more accustomed to it again, and I think I've settled on a team of Kefla/Super Broly/Lab Coat 21 for now. Though as always with this game it is tempting to make other teams and start learning them, particularly since I keep running into people doing things with characters that I like that weren't possible the last time I played.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-19, 06:49 PM

I thought it worked especially well in Forspoken simply because Frey isn't meant to be a likeable character. She's abrasive, standoffish, and selfish for a decent chunk of the game. She's making quips to show that she's "too cool" for everyone else, but a lot of her audience in-game are either annoyed or confused by it. Most of her arc is coming to realize she's her own worst enemy because she's internalized a view of the world where it screwed her, it'll always screw her, and so she needs to take what she can get whenever she can. I remember her getting progressively less quippy as the game went on; she opened up and started taking things more seriously. She ends up more earnest than she started, even if she's still a 20 year-old New Yorker.

Rynjin

2024-03-19, 06:59 PM

That's neat and all but swinging hot out of the gate with an unlikeable protagonist going through a pretty generic isekai story setup doesn't do much to make me narratively invested, and the gameplay was just kinda...okay so I'm not going to be sticking with it purely out of the fun factor.

The early part of a game really needs to hook you in, and you only get one chance at first impressions. That opening bit where she's getting shaken down in an alley and clapping back with dialogue that would make a high schooler's first attempt at writing a play look like fine art is not a great hook. And somehow, the non-Frey characters have even WORSE dialogue.

I get what they were going for. She's supposed to be this sassy, streetwise girl who gets by on wits and quick reflexes. Issue is she comes off as very un-wise and not knowing "how to play the game" around the thugs she's supposed to be working with, and in general not very smart at all, so there's not much reason to root for her.

She's not a "jerk with a heart of gold", she's just a jerk surrounded by bigger jerks.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-19, 08:09 PM

She's not a "jerk with a heart of gold", she's just a jerk surrounded by bigger jerks.

She's not supposed to be a "sassy, streetwise girl who gets by on wits." It's very apparent from the first hour or so of the game that she's not getting by. She has no friends, she's facing serious criminal time due to her rap sheet, her peers are all users who see her as a tool (and try to kill her shortly after the game starts), she lives in an abandoned tenement, and she's not very good at much besides running away (which, intentional or not, is some great symbolism). The intro even ends with her two seconds away from suicide. Nothing about the first hour says that she's making it work. And the biggest clue to her character comes after being isekai'd. In a very non-generic way, after being teleported to a beautiful new world and granted fantastic magic powers, she takes one look at a monster and has a "Nope, f*** this. Send me home." moment. The girl who was about to leap off a building to her death would rather go back to wallowing in the misery she knows than take a risk doing something new.

She's a very broken person who's using her trauma as a blanket to wrap herself in. All the quips and sass are a facade hiding her insecurities, plus a way to needle people into being antagonistic towards her so she doesn't have to improve. As long as she has enemies to blame, she can keep being a horrible troll and pretending that it's not her fault that life is so bad.

I don't think you're even supposed to root for her at the start. As you said, you can point out a multitude of instances where she does something stupid for no real gain. It's not an Aladdin-like tale of a typical street kid becoming a hero, but more like the story of the worst person for the job being forced to be a savior. It's got a lot of clumsy dialogue (though I think the writing and the performances by the Tantas are all fantastic), but I think I enjoyed it mostly because it's so different than the usual barely-disguised shonen plot that most videogames use. It's even juxtaposed against itself, being a power-fantasy wizard game with a protagonist you absolutely do not want to be.

Sapphire Guard

2024-03-19, 10:12 PM

I fall somewhere in the middle. Her dialogue isn't perfect, but it kind of sounds like what someone trying to be quippy would actually sound like. I do like her trying to be quippy with the gang at the start, where they respond by ' I am going to continue beating you'

Most of it is justified, she doesn't know what things are called, so she has to improvise names off the cuff. She's reluctant to save the world, but when you think about it, it's asking rather a lot.

'Hey newbie with powers you barely understand, go fight the most dangerous sorceress in the world.Have fun.' Sila is a hardened veteran with decades of experience, and combat is literally her specialty. If you take away the meta where the protagonist probably won't die, that's pretty much a death sentence. I don't think not being keen on that is necessarily selfish.

Frey is pointlessly snippy, she can't help but say stupid things (I mean, one of the first things she does is get mouthy with the presiding judge, a very counterproductive thing to do. I do think that she is supposed to be stupidly quippy to a self destructive degree.

In other news, I'm trying to play FFXVI. Enjoying it, but there is a moment where you have to pick up some sacks in the hideway, and the game glitches and won't let me progress. Annoying, it's not like those sacks can be too hard on memory.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-20, 05:00 AM

Is there any evidence that Loghain engineered / allowed the Darkspawn attack on the Tower of Ishal, or is that just pure headcanon?

Howe told Loghain that 'somehow' two Wardens survived Ostagar. That implies he'd made fairly sure that they'd all fall there. Loghain's troops in the Lothering inn were asking around explicitly for 'an [PC race] of this very description'. That implies that Loghain quickly worked out which two. We also learn that Loghain is perhaps the only one apart from the Guerrin brothers who know of Alistair's parentage. Which explains why he sent the Crows against them.

I can't say it's provable that Loghain pulled his guards off the tower; merely that it fits all the other actions Loghain did on this and his general goals. And if for want of a Flemeth, it would have been [a 'rogue element' which nobody could really fit into their plots].

Errorname

2024-03-20, 06:39 AM

I'll say that everything you're saying is consistent with Loghain not actively sabotaging the tower defense and the Wardens being sent to the tower as an actual spanner in his plans

Just in the game as presented the tower doesn't seem like it was unguarded, they just weren't expecting the attack and got taken by surprise

Batcathat

2024-03-20, 06:41 AM

Just in the game as presented the tower doesn't seem like it was unguarded, they just weren't expecting the attack and got taken by surprise

Also, aren't the temporary party members you get in the tower guards fleeing from it? Or are they arriving from somewhere else? I don't remember the specifics.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-20, 08:49 AM

Also, aren't the temporary party members you get in the tower guards fleeing from it? Or are they arriving from somewhere else? I don't remember the specifics.

Guards from the tower, IIRC the one you always get is even called 'Tower Guard'. However it's implied not to be a significant force, in the strategy meeting Login mentions having 'a few men stationed there'.

It's feasible that if the battle started to turn they were to light the beacon, kill the Wardens, and attempt to regroup with the rest of Logan's forces.

halfeye

2024-03-20, 09:08 AM

It's feasible that if the battle started to turn they were to light the beacon, kill the Wardens, and attempt to regroup with the rest of Logan's forces.

If you attempt to enter the tower while wandering around before the Kokari Wilds, you meet that tower guard who tells you "this tower is off limits to you at the moment".

Cespenar

2024-03-20, 11:16 AM

Started to play Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Pretty funny writing and all that, but it plays like they actually wanted to record a tv drama, couldn't find the budget, and decided to go with a video game as a second choice.

Rynjin

2024-03-20, 07:25 PM

Started to play Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Pretty funny writing and all that, but it plays like they actually wanted to record a tv drama, couldn't find the budget, and decided to go with a video game as a second choice.

The Yakuza series works better as games than movies or tv shows; there is an early 2000s adaptation of the first game which is actually decent but loses a lot of the charm that comes with the downtime moments

Errorname

2024-03-20, 10:27 PM

It's feasible that if the battle started to turn they were to light the beacon, kill the Wardens, and attempt to regroup with the rest of Logan's forces.

I guess? No evidence of that, despite how easy it would have been for them to backstab you after lighting the beacon

I tend to interpret the Tower as an actually smart move on Cailan's part that did throw a wrench into Loghain's plot. Fits with the undercurrent ot Cailan not being quite as dumb as he seems and Loghain being less in control than he seems

LibraryOgre

2024-03-21, 09:43 AM

Loghain planned to pull back and let everyone at Ostagar get killed. He wasn't planning on saving the Tower of Ishal somehow; they were all going to die in his version.

He didn't need to pull back anything more than he was planning to, and we don't know whose troops were in Ishal.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-21, 02:03 PM

I'll say that everything you're saying is consistent with Loghain not actively sabotaging the tower defense and the Wardens being sent to the tower as an actual spanner in his plans

Just in the game as presented the tower doesn't seem like it was unguarded, they just weren't expecting the attack and got taken by surprise

If I knew I was going to abandon the field anyway, I wouldn't put a load of my own troops to be abandoned with it. Now, if I'd left it undefended it would be suspicious [like if I'd packed up my tent with my personal possessions etc] so I would leave a 'minimum credible force' to guard the tower, which proved [predictably] too weak to stop the darkspawn.

If you attempt to enter the tower while wandering around before the Kokari Wilds, you meet that tower guard who tells you "this tower is off limits to you at the moment".

And why is it off-limits, pray tell? Is it the 'tunnels in the dungeons' which were found [but he'd not seen anything like that when he was in there]? What the hell is that massive hole in the bottom floor which looks like it might go all the way to the Deep Roads?

Errorname

2024-03-21, 02:21 PM

Loghain planned to pull back and let everyone at Ostagar get killed. He wasn't planning on saving the Tower of Ishal somehow; they were all going to die in his version.

My thinking is more that the Darkspawn coming up through the tower caught everyone off guard and wasn't expected. If the Darkspawn had advanced as anticipated the Tower of Ishal would have been the last to fall, leaving the wardens stationed there able to fall back and regroup. That ends up happening anyways but requires Flemeth's intervention.

Loghain's command does not entirely consist of his own loyal troops, and given how feudal politics work and the nature of Loghain's plan it was absolutely in his interest to winnow down much of the army under his command because much of it answered to people who could become political rivals going forward.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-21, 02:33 PM

I figure that Loghain stationed someone there who wanted to be away from the battle, but who was not part of his plan... the idea that Ishal would be relatively safe would be attractive to a number of people.

OTOH, what would have happened if Loghain had taken an arrow early in the battle? Even if he didn't die, it was pretty clear his second wasn't expecting them to withdraw... what happens when the beacon goes off and Loghain isn't there to order the withdrawal?

Errorname

2024-03-21, 02:46 PM

Ser Cauthrien takes the command and follows the plan, I think.

My instinct is it still breaks badly. Cailan probably still dies and the Tower still gets overrun, I don't think the charge would make it in time for the King (he dies quite soon after Loghain pulls out) and the Tower is too far from the front to matter. One the positive side with the manpower provided by Loghain's force and a seasoned commander in Cauthrien they might be able to retreat in good order and keep the army from taking losses as severe, they might be able to keep Duncan and some of his other Wardens alive. Combine that with Loghain not living long enough to call off Cailan's request for Orlesian reinforcements and things might still work out okay.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-21, 02:59 PM

...OTOH, what would have happened if Loghain had taken an arrow early in the battle? Even if he didn't die, it was pretty clear his second wasn't expecting them to withdraw... what happens when the beacon goes off and Loghain isn't there to order the withdrawal?

Which is partly why I have the 'Loghain intended the Tower to fall before Calian did' theory. Without the fire-signal, he would not have to get Ser Cauthrien to ignore it and then do some personal doublethink later on to convince herself that either she didn't see it or Loghain 'had worked out it was a Grey Warden trap'. Nor would they need to do their best to squash the rumours coming out of Loghain's personal army about it, such as the 'Tortured Noble' quest.

Instead, Loghain waited for the signal which never came. He then quit the field when it was genuinely obvious that the battle was lost and there was no point throwing good troops after bad. With no survivors from the Wardens, he can freely heap all the blame on them for not 'doing their duty' and filling Calian's head with BS about glory and so on which caused the defeat. He comes out of this 100% clean and with his fans [Ser Cauthrien being the #1] still having absolute faith in him.

halfeye

2024-03-21, 05:25 PM

And why is it off-limits, pray tell?

We aren't told.

The army camp is off limits to you in the same way, and you're not told why there either, as are the Kokari Wilds (though you are allowed into the Wilds after Duncan gives you orders to go there). I don't think you can go into either the army camp or the Tower before the big meeting.

Sapphire Guard

2024-03-21, 06:15 PM

It would make sense not to let anyone near the beacon tower. Don't see how it could be part of Loghain's plan unless he was in communication with darkspawn, which seems unlikely.

Sermil

2024-03-21, 07:47 PM

Honestly, after playing a bunch of Cobalt Core, I'm getting nostalgic for the depth of Slay the Spire. Maybe I'll dust off Watcher and see if I can get her off my pathetic Ascension of 1. (Watcher was always my worst character by a fair amount)

WritersBlock

2024-03-21, 09:29 PM

With the mess that is Dragon's Dogma 2 (Always online despite being single player, Capcom's insane and disturbing anti modding stance), and just Capcom being what it is now, I decided to pick up Astlibra Revision instead. A pretty nice metroidvaniaish action rpg so far. With a skill tree so large it has its own map which made me crack up laughing. (its mostly stat boosts actually) Also seems to been insprired from the side scrolling Ys games. (like Wanderers from Ys) And the music is great as well.

Might check out Eternights as well. And checking Gog and seeing that they managed to bring back Alpha Protocol I am also considering checking that out.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-21, 10:31 PM

Capcom's insane and disturbing anti modding stance

Not that insane when you know that they've been relatively hands-off, in a "we don't support it, but do whatever" way, and that led to some boneheads plastering a nude Chun-li on screen during a Street Fighter 6 tournament. They're being draconic, but when a major brand of yours gets that kind of publicity, I can imagine there are a lot of people demanding it never happen again.

Rynjin

2024-03-21, 11:04 PM

WritersBlock

2024-03-21, 11:23 PM

Them saying "mods are cheats" as a justification for it was what really got me. I mean even if they were if I want to cheat in my SINGLE PLAYER VIDEO GAME, then I should be well within my rights to do so. (Those who use cheats in a pvp game or an mmo are jerks) And capcom dmca'ed a ton of resident evil 4 mods (all to do with Ashley or Ada) I am just wondering if that was before or after the chun-li sf6 debacle.

In an unrelated note, I still need to finish playing Digimon cyber sleuth sometime.

Zevox

2024-03-21, 11:30 PM

It's insane to deliberately tank the performance of your games because you failed to vet a tournament broadcast. I've never been entirely clear on how that even HAPPENED unless they run recording footage directly through the caster and/or player's (whoever had the mod installed) personal system, which there is absolutely zero reason to do in a professionally run event.
A little googling finds the answer there: it was the tournament organizer's mod, and they were streaming the tournament from their PC. Looks like it was a weekly tournament run by a small European FGC group, almost certainly an online one (meaning it would need to be streamed by someone spectating each match as they happen), though I can't find confirmation of that detail easily for some reason. So, not really a professionally run event at all - which is fairly common with FGC tournaments to my understanding. Outside of the really big tournaments like Evo, CEO, or Combo Breaker, that's the kind of thing most fighting game tournaments are: community events, run by the fans themselves. And even the big events started that way, aside from the publishers' own yearly tournaments like Capcom Cup.

Rynjin

2024-03-22, 01:52 AM

So it was some random schmucks running a small local tournament and Capcom wigged out over it. Yeah, insane covers it pretty well.

Corlindale

2024-03-22, 02:42 AM

Same here. Took me a while longer to take her through Ascension 20 than the three others. She has some extremely powerful tricks, but she's tricky to play right. But when the stars align it can be so beautiful. Like that one game where I had 4 copies of Omniscience (1 of them bottled). Starting every battle by pulling out any 4 cards from my deck and playing them twice was hilariously overpowered.

In other news, my Gunslinger died an ignoble death in Tales of Maj'Eyal. Made it to the second half of the final area, but ran into a boss mob that summoned evil clones of me with Inner Demons, and messed up my plays trying to get out of it. But I got some nice unlocks through that game still (I'm on a new PC so I'm re-unlocking things since I didn't set up the cloud save properly. Don't really mind much, unlocking things is fun). So I have Annihilator back, one of my absolute favourite classes (Hot take: Way too few fantasy games have classes whose central feature is automated, heat-seeking, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers that can also become jetpacks).

But I'm taking a short break from the steampunk and trying the original campaign again, this time going for a Nightmare victory with the Paradox Mage, another favourite class and my first one to beat Normal difficulty back in the day. Having a good feeling so far, but it's still early days. One of the many good things about the Paradox Mage is that it has a ton of panic buttons when you get into a tight spot: Teleport away, make a time shield that heals you for the damage you would have taken, kick a dangerous enemy out of existence for a few turns, teleport yourself to a timeless demiplane, split the timeline and play through three different futures and then choose which one becomes real, or just good old Time Stop. Or set up a Contingency to do any of the above when you fall below x amount of hp. Did I say how much I love this class?

Whoracle

2024-03-22, 04:45 AM

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - Playing this on and off, currently in Chapter 5. I low-key like it, but it doesn't WOW me. Dunno why exactly.

Octopath Traveler - I recently 100%ed OT2, loved that, and am now on the final boss of OT1. I bounced off OT1 hard back when it was released, but this time I persevered. Final boss sucks, though, and I most definitely won't 100% it.

Otcopath Traveler II - Tried this when I was bored, annd WOW. It literally improved on every single aspect of OT1. This game won't let me go - I am currently looking for ideas for challenge runs or something like that to have an "excuse" to play it again. This is the first game in a LONG time that has gripped me so hard.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-22, 05:10 AM

We aren't told.

Yes we are. They found tunnels in the basem*nt levels of the Tower. Though the gate guard says he didn't see anything like that when he was in there.

This is confirmed visually when you're in said tower - one of the rooms on the bottom floor has a massive hole in the floor; the type you could imagine reaching into the Deep Roads.

So it was some random schmucks running a small local tournament and Capcom wigged out over it. Yeah, insane covers it pretty well.

Computer game budgets can now rival what you'd pay for a major TV series or mid-budget film. IP is also ranked to be very valuable. They are ultra-protective of their investments and are worried about some 'series of tubes' politicos/campaigners doing a 'think of the children!' campaign against something which wasn't their fault [for example, raising the age limits on it]. Being seen to 'clamp down' on such things is a loss-minimisation strategy ie mollifying the moral guardians etc.

Overreaction? Perhaps. But not 'insane'.

Zevox

2024-03-22, 08:44 AM

So it was some random schmucks running a small local tournament and Capcom wigged out over it. Yeah, insane covers it pretty well.
"Local" is not necessarily the term for an online tournament, and small is relative (I found the listing for it, it had 52 players competing - much smaller than the major tournaments, but still a pretty decent size, especially for a weekly). But close enough.

Imterestingly, that group is still running tournaments today, so Capcom wasn't ticked enough to make them shut down. And I guarantee someone from Capcom had words with them after, even small tournaments need to follow certain guidelines from them, and there's obviously no way this didn't violate some part of those guidelines.

LibraryOgre

2024-03-22, 09:13 AM

I beat the story mode of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw by surprise on Wednesday. Still a really fun game, and I'll probably go back and do the randoms for every so often, because I do like the flight simulator aspects.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-22, 03:03 PM

So it was some random schmucks running a small local tournament and Capcom wigged out over it. Yeah, insane covers it pretty well.

I'd consider it exceptionally sane to freak out over videos of your game with nudity added broadcast over a professional-looking setting. The average person isn't going to understand the difference between a player- or company-run event. On the lawmaker side, we live in a post-hot coffee world. You definitely do not want your flagship brand associated with smut and dogpiled by legislators looking to score a quick "for the kids" win.

Also, as far as I know, Capcom hasn't actually done anything about mods. They made a few changes to DRM, the modders quickly updated their stuff to work with the new versions, and everything is still business as usual. If anything it seemed exceptionally performative. If a legal team does come after them for it, they can point to their statements and DRM and say "We did as much as we could and those rascally modders outfoxed us."

Rynjin

2024-03-22, 03:12 PM

Lawmakers have nothing, because it's not a corporate-sponsored event. That battle has been fought and lost by crusty, out of touch dinosaurs before, and will be again. The average person isn't going to hear about it.

It's an overreaction to a non-event.

They added extra layers of DRM (tanking performance in all of their games) and anti-cheat (to...single player games, ALSO tanking performance). The only people here who lose are the consumers. There is nothing to gain from this.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-22, 03:59 PM

It's an overreaction to a non-event.

Hot Coffee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)) disputes this.

To sum up if you don't want to read the full entry, Rockstar left a minigame stubbed out in the code on the GTA San Andreas discs. The minigame featured zero nudity, but some simulated sex acts. A modder found the code and reenabled it, then distributed it around the internet. It caused such a scandal that saw the game rerated as Adults Only, banned from sale in Australia, a class action lawsuit, and a warning from the US FTC. All because a modder put it out there. I'd hardly call that a "battle that has been fought and lost" by lawmakers.

Granted the circ*mstances are a bit difference here, since Hot Coffee used content on disc, but I cannot blame Capcom for erring on the side of caution as our legal institutions are run by dinosaurs, as you called them, that barely understand video games and certainly don't know anything about computer code.

Claims that Capcom has caused performance issues by adding Enigma DRM to Resident Evil Revelations are "nonsense," popular RE modder says. (https://www.pcgamesn.com/resident-evil/revelations-enigma-drm)

I looked into this before when it was a huge controversy. Nobody could provide any examples of their performance tanking due to the DRM updates. It was a rumor spread like wildfire that I suspect originated in piracy communities to cloak their anger at Capcom's actions in an air of justifiability.

Mr Blobby

2024-03-22, 04:18 PM

Personally, I think the likes of Capcom et al are not worried about 'lawmakers' so much, but are scared as hell of public backlash, esp from the likes of social media. They don't want the WalMarts of the world to get spooked and quit stocking their product.

A load of Maude Flanders-es shreking 'think of the children' on FB and a corp stockist being reminded by the Big Boss 'we're a family company and this looks baaaad' are immune to legal arguments, technical details or simple common sense. There are times you need to be seen to be doing something, even if it's utterly ineffective.

Rynjin

2024-03-22, 04:37 PM

Hot Coffee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)) disputes this.

The circ*mstances are literally nothing alike, for the exact reasons you mention. And is also an extremely old case that has since been buried in legal precedent by subsequent cases on modding, and even broader protections that apply to 3rd party content applied to an "interactive computer service" that have been bolstered in recent years. Look up Section 230, which social media platforms and services like Youtube use as well.

The TL;DR is that the company that provides a service is not responsible for what 3rd parties use their platform for.

It's Denuvo that primarily tanks performance, and that's very well documented. Any time they go back and remove it from a game, the performance of said game increases noticeably.

WritersBlock

2024-03-22, 06:46 PM

I can indeed confirm Denuvo ruins game performance especially load times. I got the PC version of Code Vein on sale a while ago and did not see a notice on the store page that it had Denuvo (Thought it was removed or inactive now, what a fool I was) and the game has load times that are way too long for a game as oldish as it is and for my PC specs (I play several much more demanding games than that take much less time to load). I have always hated how people on steam discussions keep outright defending crap like that.

Zevox

2024-03-22, 10:12 PM

Getting close to the end of FF7 Rebirth on hard. I'll save overall thoughts for when I'm done, but for now, I have to say that the
Rufus Shinra
boss fight is great on hard. A lot of back and forth, requires you to get a good handle on its ins and outs to overcome it, and even once you do, it's not easy. Very fun, probably my favorite boss fight in the game (though we'll see what some of the last ones are like on hard).

Sermil

2024-03-22, 10:37 PM

The TL;DR is that the company that provides a service is not responsible for what 3rd parties use their platform for.

You're arguing legality and missing the point. The point is not that they are legally responsible for what a third-party does. The point is that their public reputation will take a hit and their all-important stock price will take a hit because of the whiff of scandal.

It is a perfectly rational response to them wanting a particular reputation.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-23, 12:52 AM

It is a perfectly rational response to them wanting a particular reputation.

Even the legality is shaky, just because many lawmakers don't really understand technology and what a "mod" is. All it would take is enough public visibility and the hammer would come down. Heck, Balatro - the poker-inspired roguelike cardgame that just released - had a brush with it recently because someone at the ratings board saw "poker," assumed it must be a gambling game, and jumped the rating from 3+ to 18+ which delisted it from stores in some countries.

Jophiel

2024-03-23, 01:47 AM

Been playing Dragon's Dogma 2. There's a swarm of angry comments about it and they're pretty legitimate:
Microtransactions: You can buy a bunch of stuff and Capcom presented it on the store page in the worst possible way, like some giant wall of purchase options. But you can also get nearly all the stuff in-game anyway (the rest are items carved off the Deluxe Edition) and not even for much in-game currency.
Save Game: You only have a single save file, which is fine, but you can't even delete/restart the file. So, if you finish the tutorial, decide you want your character to look a little different and figure "I'll just start over and redo this..." haha, no you can't. On PC, you can kludge around it with deleting the file in Windows, turning Steam Cloud and Capcom Network off, then on later, etc. But it's dumb and there's no good earthly reason I can think of for it.
Performance: The game is very CPU bound for NPCs and an i5-10600 is the minimum spec. I'm playing on an i7-13700k and it's been fine but I could see others having trouble with older/cheaper processors.
Always Online (?): I assume this is because of the Pawn system where you hire on NPC assistants created by other players. I'm not sure the game actually is always online since you can turn off connecting to Capcom network whenever you want and just use game-created pawns rather than community created ones.

Sapphire Guard

2024-03-23, 05:21 PM

Should be playing FFXVI, but couldn't fix the glitch, so the playthrough came to a sudden end. And so Clive put out his back lifting sacks in the hideaway, and his adventure ended there.

Zevox

2024-03-23, 11:52 PM

All that aside, the actual game -- the part where you move a little person around and stab monsters and pick berries -- is very enjoyable and engaging. If you played.liked Dragons Dogma 1, this is more of the same basic game. Different vocation options or abilities or gear but the broad strokes are identical. The game is more open world, with more to explore and get in trouble off the beaten path. Been playing for the last few nights and gone dagger-ham on a bunch of goblins, climbed on some giant critters so I could stab them too, got some skills to set my daggers on fire and another to leap into the air and spin with my daggers like Sonic the Fiery Dagger Hedgehog, listened to my pawns natter on about a cave they see, some apples they found or what classes we should recruit, ran some quests, died a bunch to some harpies that I later annihilated, etc. Solid fun times when you're talking about the actual game and it's a shame Capcom had to dork up the launch with their dumb microtransaction stuff and bizarre save file decisions.
#1 seems to not be the concern it sounded like when I first saw reports of it. If the stuff you can buy is as readily available in-game as I've seen people saying, then those microtransactions are like them selling red orbs in DMC5. Technically it's there and it is a microtransaction, but not only did they not warp the game to try and sell them the way you'd fear, they're basically just a waste of money that's there to try and bring in a little extra from stupid people. Not a good thing, but not anything that actually impacts the game.

#3 is PC-specific, so not relevant to a console player like me.

#2 and #4 concern me considerably. There just no excuse for having only one save file in this day and age, nevermind making it hard to delete it if you want to restart. And as someone who plays all his games other than fighting games offline and has no interest in the Pawn system (which was always one of the things I disliked in the first game), always online would also be pretty inexcusable to me, even if it wouldn't technically prevent me from playing.

I've also seen some people claim the game doesn't have fast travel? Is that true? I've been seeing mixed claims on it, but boy would that be a huge mark against it, if it's bigger than the first game but doesn't provide the one feature that helps make open-world game design somewhat bearable.

Rynjin

2024-03-23, 11:58 PM

It's a complete and utter fabrication. Not only does it have the exact same fast travel system as the first game (using Portcrystals to set up your own teleport network, and then Ferrystones to teleport), it also introduces Oxcarts that travel between major settlements, at the cost of occasionally being ambushed mid-trip.

There's a lot of people just straight up lying about DD2 for reasons I don't understand.

Jophiel

2024-03-24, 01:38 AM

WritersBlock

2024-03-24, 04:06 AM

It is awful having only one save file. Especially when my antivirus deletes my save file like it did with dead cells and even with cloud storage I could not recover it. Or when I was farming Those giant crystal realms in my ps4 version of Shadow warrior 2 and all the missions disappeared except the dlc christmas mission and all those upgrades and levels went down the drain.

Considering crap like that and how so many game companies don't seem to hire actual programmers, I think its quite important to let you save whenever you want to or at least have more save slots.
(like a like of falcom games have or Astlibra revision that also has quite a few pages of save slots, sword and fairy 7 had tons of slots as well)

halfeye

2024-03-24, 10:55 AM

I don't remember which game you are talking about, but that does sound bad.

Considering crap like that and how so many game companies don't seem to hire actual programmers,

Programming is not easy.

Programming is like writing a story, but if you get something wrong later on, you can destroy the whole story rather than having an oops moment. Of course, retcons and bugfixes can save the day, but it all interacts and one bugfix can cause another bug if you don't understand everything about the whole system (which since several somebodies else wrote other parts of it, you almost certainly don't).

Zevox

2024-03-24, 11:16 AM

There's a lot of people just straight up lying about DD2 for reasons I don't understand.
That's good to hear at least.

If someone dislikes the entire pawn system, Dragon's Dogma is probably just not a great fit for them. The game revolves around the pawns both mechanically from a balance perspective and in-game where the plot is all about you being the Arisen who can summon forth pawns. Most of the other stuff the game does well can probably be found in some other fantasy action RPG.
The combat, particularly how well it handled combat with large monsters, was what I liked about it. At the time at least no other game had done that so well. And honestly, that's kind of what I expect to like in a Capcom game - gameplay, particularly combat, tends to be their strong suit. Not so much the story, that was kind of a joke even in the first game, and I know better than to expect strong writing out of Capcom in anything besides Ace Attorney anyway.

The Pawn system I disliked because it's just inferior to having actual party members. You get stuck with bland followers who repeat the same few lines constantly, and can only even customize your main one, you have to use premade/other people's pawns for your other two, which sucks even compared to having a fully customizable party like in Dragon Quest 3 and 9 (which is itself inferior to actual party members). I don't know why they thought the weird system of sharing your pawns with other players was a good idea, but I disagree with them on it.

Jophiel

2024-03-24, 11:44 AM

I figure if they were static NPCs, they'd be no more dynamic or exciting; it'd just be the same three faces saying the same lines. It's not as though your main pawn does anything more than the two temps do, after all. But, being hireable, I don't need to sweat about equipping them or spending money on them and it's always nice when I'm trotting about and one says "In another time, we found a cave near here -- want me to show it to you?" because their actual owner did, in fact, discover a cave and imprinted the knowledge on their pawn.

Even better is when they say "Oh, my master completely missed this! I'll have to bring news to them" because I found something they didn't :smallbiggrin:

Form

2024-03-24, 11:53 AM

My partial second playthrough of Lies of P became a full playthrough. I've killed all the bosses by myself this time, including the King of Puppets and the secret boss after the 'final' boss. Got all the music records and defeated 2 stalkers that I had spared the first time around too.

Though I did sort of cheap shot 2-3 of the bosses. By throwing a couple of firebombs and/or shot puts at their head to whittle down their last little bit of health. No, Nameless Puppet, I don't think I will enter melee range to stagger you with melee attacks when you're almost dead. I'll just throw this metal ball that I have in my pocket at your head and then wail on you.

Zevox

2024-03-24, 02:13 PM

So, finished up FF7 Rebirth hard mode today. For those that don't know, hard in FF7 Remake/Rebirth is kind of the New Game+ mode - you only get access to it upon beating the game, and only by using Chapter Select with a file that's already beaten the game. In Rebirth it's balanced around the assumption of you being at the game's maximum level to boot. Besides just amping up the difficulty, it also has a couple of major mechanic changes: you cannot use items (i.e. potions, phoenix downs, etc) at all, and in places where you'd normally fully restore hp and mp (inns, benches) you only restore hp, not mp. You do get a full restore at the end of each chapter, so you can go nuts on the final boss of the chapter, but before then this makes mp management a hell of a lot more important, and methods of healing that don't use mp massively more valuable even if they're less effective than ordinary healing magic. It also means resurrection spells are a lot more important since you lack easy access to phoenix downs.

All that explained, while I enjoyed the hard mode run quite a bit (more so than the initial run in many regards, both due to the challenge and due to already having the open-world filler done*), I do think it works less well in Rebirth than in Remake, in large part because you have a much larger party. In Remake you spend most of the game with a part of only 2-3 characters, only hitting 4 near the end, once you've reached Aerith in the Shinra Building, so your mp management is a lot harder, and Chakra/Prayer incredibly important. In Rebirth, you've got 5 characters minimum, 6 for most of the game, and 7 tops, and you're only using 3 at a time - it's a lot easier to have a character who's not doing the fighting use cure + magnify to keep the party topped off and not be that worried if they run out of mp. Or you could burn mp fairly normally on everyone but Cloud and just switch party members when your current two run low. I found I just didn't need the non-mp healing effects nearly as much this time around because of that. And with how potent Aerith's Soul Drain ability is at restoring her mp (just use it on a staggered foe), it's easy to keep her able to keep throwing magic around to boot.

And that's all without getting into the fact that there is a way to restore mp to full in this one, though I think it's a bug. Resting at Chocobo Rest Stops, the ones you need a cushion to use, still restores your mp. This kind of defeats the purpose of the mode though, so I'm assuming it's unintentional, and I avoided them after I found out. But until they patch it out, you can totally abuse it to defeat a big part of the challenge of hard difficulty.

Anyway, I'm actually still not quite done with the game. The real hardest challenges seem to be the post-game Battle Square and Combat Simulator fights, as I only managed to do some of those before deciding I wanted to finish the story on hard instead of bashing my head against the wall some of them represent. I'll be trying to finish those, but I'm not sure if I will - the Combat Simulator fights in particular are kind of long, being either five straight rounds with a single character or ten with a team, which gets rough just in the amount of time an attempt takes. Still, the fact that I do want to do them should tell you just how much I love the combat in this game, it's fantastic.

*For reference, my hard mode run was about 40 hours shorter than my initial run because of that. And still longer than any run I did in FF7 Remake.

Even better is when they say "Oh, my master completely missed this! I'll have to bring news to them" because I found something they didn't :smallbiggrin:
Even Capcom can manage to create characters with a basic personality and backstory, which is all it'd take to be better than the pawns. And I'll take having to equip them over needing to hire new ones every couple of levels because only your main one levels up with you.

Rynjin

2024-03-24, 02:32 PM

It's a fun social system. I like seeing other peoples' creations. I like hiring my friends' Pawns. Them being "actual characters" wouldn't add much, because this is not a story-driven game. I would rather hear useful banter repeated over and over than the same bland story bits, which is what happens with most RPG characters with "real personality".

Zevox

2024-03-24, 04:07 PM

Half the time they'd say the same stuff ("We really should be getting back to the city!") and half the time they'd say stuff that'd get older way faster ("You know my father used to say 'You've got to grab life by the horns!'. I wonder what he meant by that?").
I like none of those things about the pawns and feel like them being actual characters would add a lot - i.e. having any actual personality to the people you spend the most time with in the game at all.

The pawn system is just a really low bar to clear being better than, IMO. It's quite a glaring weakness of the game to me.

Jophiel

2024-03-24, 05:59 PM

It's a fun social system. I like seeing other peoples' creations.
Yeah, same. I like "pawn shopping" before setting out and seeing everyone's creations. I like getting my pawn back with a little gift and story about their time abroad. It's like perfect social interaction for me: I get to feel like part of a community without needing to, ew, talk to people :smallbiggrin:

WritersBlock

2024-03-24, 07:09 PM

Picked up Drakensang off gog since it was on sale for 2 bucks, installing to try it out for a little bit to see how it is. (Maybe get a few mods for it first as well)

Rynjin

2024-03-24, 07:52 PM

I like none of those things about the pawns and feel like them being actual characters would add a lot - i.e. having any actual personality to the people you spend the most time with in the game at all.

The pawn system is just a really low bar to clear being better than, IMO. It's quite a glaring weakness of the game to me.

Them being 'actual characters" wouldn't add anything to the game and would arguably detract from it. If I don't like a pawn's face, voice, attitude, how they fight, etc. I can trade them out anytime.

If I don't like an "actual character" in an RPG I'm stuck with them and their annoying catchphrases the entire game.

Zevox

2024-03-24, 08:48 PM

Them being 'actual characters" wouldn't add anything to the game and would arguably detract from it.
Yeah, that is just a point on which we will never agree. No RPG benefits from lacking characters, as far as I'm concerned. Even basic ones are better than non-entities like the pawns.

AlanBruce

2024-03-24, 10:39 PM

*For reference, my hard mode run was about 40 hours shorter than my initial run because of that. And still longer than any run I did in FF7 Remake.

Even Capcom can manage to create characters with a basic personality and backstory, which is all it'd take to be better than the pawns. And I'll take having to equip them over needing to hire new ones every couple of levels because only your main one levels up with you.

I finished Hard Mode on Rebirth as well. I wasnt pleased with the way Remake handled that mode and was hoping they would take notes for this title. It isnt a Souls game. And it shouldnt strive to be that.

Zevox

2024-03-24, 11:19 PM

They, predictably, went that route. In a game where you have a device that literally transmutes items, this one is rendered near obsolete in Hard Mode because of a very petty decision to restrict items. You can still make the game difficult. Dont make it restrictive. Yes, materia is typically maxed in NG+. And there are some destructive combos you can use with it. But this mode seems like the developers are punishing its player base for going back in again. A perfect example is chapter 12, with incredibly questionable back to back fights. Never mind the gauntlet that is the final stretch.
I don't agree at all. Without items turned off, the game will remain no challenge unless they buff the enemies to the point of starting one or two hit killing your characters regularly*. You can stockpile a ton of them and they're very powerful, especially Phoenix Downs, which you get plenty of from very early. The way Remake handled the mode worked fantastically, I felt; Rebirth, less so, due to the reasons I outlined. I actually really liked the Chapter 12 gauntlet - as I mentioned, the last boss of that on hard is my favorite fight in the game, and I didn't feel any before him were too hard. Even one immediately prior only took me two tries. The final stretch is fine too, you don't even have to restart earlier fights if you fail in a later one, it's quite generous on that.

*One of the few bosses I have a complaint about is actually because it does that:
The Red Dragon fight on hard is ridiculous, because its unblockable breath weapon that envelops the floor hits the entire stage, rather than having a part of it you can run to to safety like in normal/dynamic. This does so much damage that the only character I had survive it was Barret with an HP Up materia at full health. I thought an obvious answer to this would be using Elemental Materia + Fire Materia on my characters' armor, get that immunity/absorb to fire and render a lot of its attacks useless; nope, doesn't work. In fact, the boss seems to completely ignore all sources of invincibility besides Limit Breaks - and I mean the animation while you're performing the Limit Break, as even Aerith's Planet's Protection Limit Break got ignored as soon as the animation ended, and its whole purpose is to give you temporary invincibility. That combination was just kind of BS.
And it is no way comparable to Dark Souls, let's be clear. Dark Souls did not invent being hard, and that is not its defining feature, and FF7 Remake/Rebirth does not share any of its actual defining features. Frankly they are much better games than Dark Souls in many ways, IMO, and I find the challenge they present with their hard modes much more satisfying than Dark Souls', personally.

Rynjin

2024-03-24, 11:42 PM

Yeah, that is just a point on which we will never agree. No RPG benefits from lacking characters, as far as I'm concerned. Even basic ones are better than non-entities like the pawns.

Frankly, Pawns have more personality than most "actual characters" I've been saddled with in my RPGs. I think this is just a matter of you not having a ton of experience with the game. Pawns acts as kind of the emergent/environmental storytelling equivalent of RPG characters. Yeah, they're replaceable, but that doesn't mean you don't get attached and a little sad when a Pawn you've been rolling with for a week gets petrified by a co*ckatrice, lets out one last "We did it master, yay teamwork!" or whatever, and then crumbles to dust, never to be seen again.

Zevox

2024-03-24, 11:49 PM

Frankly, Pawns have more personality than most "actual characters" I've been saddled with in my RPGs. I think this is just a matter of you not having a ton of experience with the game.
Sounds more like you haven't played any good RPGs to me. I played through Dragon's Dogma entirely back when it first came out, so no, my opinion is not from lack of experience, it's from not liking the whole pawn concept at a basic level.

Rynjin

2024-03-25, 12:07 AM

Sounds more like you haven't played any good RPGs to me. I played through Dragon's Dogma entirely back when it first came out, so no, my opinion is not from lack of experience, it's from not liking the whole pawn concept at a basic level.

I've played plenty of good RPGs. None in the style of DD would be improved by having distinct, story-relevant NPCs you have to drag around.

Especially as in specifically DD's case you lose out on almost all the mechanical underpinnings of Pawns if you turn them into distinct characters. Inclinations, quest experience, item trading, Pawn quests, etc. all go out the window when I'm stuck with a specific roster of characters I will likely cease to care about 2-3 runs in.

Because that's the big thing: Dragon's Dogma is a game made to be an infinite loop. You play it for the gameplay, not the story. The more unskippable story elements are added to the game, the less replayable it becomes. The more there are distinct NPCs with their own wants and desires to nag me about their personal quests, own wants and needs I have to juggle to keep the ones I like in the party without getting stuck with the ones I hate because fo choices I make this run, etc. the less I get to enjoy teh actual GAME.

These two types of NPC design are largely incompatible. The more the NPC party members actually MATTER on an individual level, the more chains get put around the player trying to play their own way.

Not every game, nor even every RPG, needs to have Final Fantasy-esque personalities which stand out to a distracting degree. Sometimes it serves the game best to have party members who fade into the background, and whose attachment is built on adventures shared, not plot told.

Zevox

2024-03-25, 12:40 AM

Because that's the big thing: Dragon's Dogma is a game made to be an infinite loop. You play it for the gameplay, not the story. The more unskippable story elements are added to the game, the less replayable it becomes.
I don't know about "infinite loop" - I found I was good with the game after my second time through - but I agree that Dragon's Dogma was a game I played for the gameplay, not the story. I do not feel like companions would make it "less replayable" (more on that in general below), or that a better story wouldn't be to its benefit though. I just don't expect Capcom's writers to be capable of more than a simple, basic story.

I don't even believe the original game was going for people not caring about the story, either. A fair bit of effort was clearly put into what story and side-quests were there; it just wasn't very good, at times becoming laughable. (I will never forget going on that quest to help the Queen, having her come up and hug me and then say "You must think me a shameless harlot," to which my mental response was "Well not until just now, but if that's where you're going with this, then yeah." Hillariously awful side-quest that one.)

Most "good RPGs" are passable games with excellent storytelling. They're one-and-dones, for the most part. I have no particular desire to do another run of Baldur's Gate 3, and likely won't for a good long while. Excellent game; not eminently replayable.
For me, that's a contradiction in terms; there's no excellent game that's not eminently replayable, because a game being good is all it needs to be replayable. I've already replayed BG3 twice, and intend to do more once I'm between new releases sometime. That's already more than Dragon's Dogma made me want to do, and the better story and characters a big part of why. I've replayed Persona 3 and 4 more times still over the years, and those don't even have the customizable main character and branching story choices of BG3; but they're my favorite games of all time, and that makes them more replayable to me than even BG3 will ever be.

These two types of NPC design are largely incompatible. The more the NPC party members actually MATTER on an individual level, the more chains get put around the player trying to play their own way.
I cannot say thay claim makes the slightest sense to me. :smallconfused:

Hell, to take the discussion away from DD for a moment, do you dislike Pokemon? Because it's largely the same thing. Your "party members" are blank slates made to serve a purpose...and yet you get attached all the same. It's the entire conceit behind Nuzlockes, after all.
Eh, I can't say I have strong feelings on Pokemon at all anymore. I liked it when I was a little kid, during the first two generations, but just kind of got bored with it after that. Diamond/Pearl was the last generation I played (and even that was out of a fit of nostalgia), and them never changing anything much or getting better stories was a big part of why. I wound up feeling like I could get the same experience by replaying my older games as buying any new ones, so I just stopped doing that, and ultimately lost interest in even replaying the older ones.

I've actually never experienced a "Nuzlocke," and only even learned what they are out of idle curiosity. They hold no particular interest to me.

These days the closest I get to Pokemon is when I play mainline Shin Megami Tensei. And yeah, I'd say having demons instead of party members in that is part of why I've never liked mainline SMT as much as spin-offs like Persona or Devil Survivor.

For a similar point of comparison, I like Fire Emblem quite a bit more than X-Com in the turn-based strategy game category. Having actual characters probably contiributed to me liking Midnight Suns more than X-Com too, though gameplay also plays a big role in that one.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-03-25, 02:33 AM

For me, that's a contradiction in terms; there's no excellent game that's not eminently replayable, because a game being good is all it needs to be replayable. I've already replayed BG3 twice, and intend to do more once I'm between new releases sometime. That's already more than Dragon's Dogma made me want to do, and the better story and characters a big part of why. I've replayed Persona 3 and 4 more times still over the years, and those don't even have the customizable main character and branching story choices of BG3; but they're my favorite games of all time, and that makes them more replayable to me than even BG3 will ever be.

You seem to really enjoy story heavy games, so it's no wonder that Dragon's Dogma isn't a winner for you.

Kardwill

2024-03-25, 03:56 AM

Yeah, you can only ever discover something once, so games that resolve around "figuring out" or finding stuff are often best during their first, unspoiled run.

The three games I enjoyed most this past year have been Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds and Breath of the Wild. (Yeah, I'm at the speartip of the Hype ^^ )
And I don't think I'll replay either of the three.

RotOD and OW are games that can really only be played once, since the core of those games is uderstanding how they work, and applying that knowledge to "solve" the game. That process can only ever be experienced blind. And the emotional impact of the OW would probably suffer a lot if I played it again, too. I don't want to cheapen that experience.
(They're fantastic games, by the way.)

Even BotW, which is pretty standard openworld RPG, probably won't be played again, because a lot of the enjoyment of the game is exploring the map and finding hidden places. That sense of wonder and discovery just won't be there on a second playthrough.

warty goblin

2024-03-25, 07:30 AM

I've never found my desire to replay a game to depend much on "replayability" as generally defined, i.e. unseen mechanical or story content. If I had a good time the first time through, I'll consider replaying it, otherwise I won't. I've happily played through Tomb Raider 2012 at least twice, and that game is completely linear. Infinite loop games, at least the singleplayer ones, tend not do much for me, at some point it's extremely obvious I'm just making the number go up, and I don't care - hence my substantial apathy towards the world of Diablo type games. Which isn't to say I need a story, I've played something like 70 hours of Crimsonland, which is pure score attack, I don't want to admit how much World of Warships, and I used to play Enemy Territory: Quake Wars in endless bot matches. If the gameplay is good and engaging, I'll show up, but I don't need replayability type stuff like NG+ or endgame content or whatever to do it. If anything, those tend to turn me off, because they often mean that the base first runthrough isn't actually good in its own right, and instead functions as some sort of weird tutorial/hazing ritual for the good stuff.

Batcathat

2024-03-25, 08:38 AM

I remember finishing Portal 2 for the first time and replaying it basically right away, despite the fact that it's entirely linear and puzzle-based (I think it was equal parts the story/characters and just how fun it is to use portals). I've replayed it a few times since then, but in those cases it's been years in between and I'm blessed with a rather poor memory.

Zevox

2024-03-25, 08:42 AM

Just off the top of my head, any game that heavily relies on exploration or puzzles has the first playthrough as the best experience. They don't tend to be particularly replayable. Sometimes, attempting to replay them can even damage the positive impressions you originally had. You simply can't re-experience the wonder of figuring out a puzzle for the first time or the surprise of finding something you had no idea existed. They're still great games; they just don't tend towards repetition.
And yet I've greatly enjoyed replaying many Legend of Zelda games, which lean heavily on puzzle elements, over the years - especially Ocarina of Time, which is one of those games I played so many times when I was younger that I've got it practically permanently memorized.

You seem to really enjoy story heavy games, so it's no wonder that Dragon's Dogma isn't a winner for you.
As I've said, I did like Dragon's Dogma. Played it through twice. That's why I'm considering getting 2. It's just I specifically liked its combat, but did not like the whole concept of the pawns. (And obviously not the story, but I doubt anyone was a big fan of that part.)

I've never found my desire to replay a game to depend much on "replayability" as generally defined, i.e. unseen mechanical or story content. If I had a good time the first time through, I'll consider replaying it, otherwise I won't. I've happily played through Tomb Raider 2012 at least twice, and that game is completely linear. Infinite loop games, at least the singleplayer ones, tend not do much for me, at some point it's extremely obvious I'm just making the number go up, and I don't care - hence my substantial apathy towards the world of Diablo type games. Which isn't to say I need a story, I've played something like 70 hours of Crimsonland, which is pure score attack, I don't want to admit how much World of Warships, and I used to play Enemy Territory: Quake Wars in endless bot matches. If the gameplay is good and engaging, I'll show up, but I don't need replayability type stuff like NG+ or endgame content or whatever to do it.
That's basically where I'm at as well. It's nice if a game I liked enough to want to replay it also has more stuff for me to see the second+ time around, it probably makes me abit more likely to replay it shortly after the first time. But it's not what makes me want to replay the game, just enjoying it enough does that.

After two times through, I've seen everything there is to see in Midnight Suns (and there wasn't much different the second time), but just mentioning it in my post last night made me consider playing it again. Because I just have that much fun playing it, and I know I'd enjoy doing so a third time.

Cygnia

2024-03-25, 08:59 AM

Hubby tried "Obra Dinn". It gave him motion sickness, but he's offered to let me play on his system to give it a spell.

Cespenar

2024-03-25, 11:17 AM

Obra Dinn is one of those rare games where you wish your memories would deprecate faster so that you may replay it again.

halfeye

2024-03-25, 12:22 PM

Just checked the achievements in DAO, and there's one for have had all possible party members, why would they do that? It's not even as if you can see the achievements before you get them.

I was thinking about trying a bit harder for Jowan, but now that seems pointless.

Obra Dinn is one of those rare games where you wish your memories would deprecate faster so that you may replay it again.

Would you rather know whether you need to buy milk?

SerTabris

2024-03-26, 01:49 AM

They can even create fun, colorful party members with distinct personalities as party members in an RPG series primarily focused on dragons! Or at least they could back on the PS1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath_of_Fire_III).

Errorname

2024-03-26, 02:58 AM

Perhaps notable that when XCOM gives the players Squaddies who are actual characters players tend to really latch onto them. But also there's massive appeal to building your own team of custom badasses who you take through each playthrough. It is a fair point that in this sort of game you want to strike a balance between the story the developers are telling and the one the players are organically creating as they play.

But that has little effect on replayability for me. I've done a bunch of XCOM playthroughs but I have also already replayed Baldur's Gate 3 a few times, a game which actively hates the idea of letting players design their own hirelings rather than playing through with the developer designed companions

Zevox

2024-03-26, 11:08 PM

Damn, these hard mode exclusive combat sims are taking me some time in FF7 Rebirth. I managed to conquer all of the single character vs 5 waves ones in a reasonable amount of time - Cloud's was the easiest, Tifa's the hardest (despite Cait Sith being the one I never play I managed to beat his in one try). But beating that those unlocked two duo character vs 10 waves ones: one for a team of Cloud and Sephiroth, and one for a team of Cloud and Zack. These are the only times besides the brief designated story moments where you can play Sephiroth and Zack.

The Sephiroth one turned out not to be too tough, only took me two tries. Partially because Sephiroth is kind of nuts, appropriately enough. Hell, his dodge being amazing and him having a good projectile ATB weapon attack basically means he's the counter to the final fight of the bunch, Odin. But the Zack one took me quite a few tries, and I only just beat it. Zack himself is notably less durable than Sephiroth, has a less useful array of magic materia equipped (you can't equip either of them), and his unique mechanic is difficult enough to use that I just gave up on doing so after a few attempts at learning it. It got the point where the first 8 fights were basically a pushover as long as I didn't get careless, but the last two against Bahamut and Odin kept tripping me up. Especially Odin, who I repeatedly got close to beating, only to have victory snatched away by Zantetsuken. You just need to play very cautious against him, and seeing the end in sight kept making me get just eager enough to see him go down to end up taking a few hits I shouldn't have and losing.

These things are fun, which is why I never gave up on that Zack one, but oh boy do they take forever. Each attempt at the Sephiroth and Zack ones took me around a half an hour, since every round is basically a boss or mini-boss (one of the summons or one of the regional mini-bosses like the Quetzacoatl and Mind Flayer). The single-character vs 5 rounds ones took about 10 minutes average for for me (Cait Sith's was the outlier at 20, which is due to a combination of me not knowing how to get great damage out of him and playing like a coward for fear of needing to it a ton of times). And there's still two of the Brutal Challenges (pick a 3 character party vs a 10-round gauntlet) to go, and those are averaging 15-20 minutes per attempt. If those last ones prove frustrating enough, I may give up on them; I've done everything else, as much as I enjoy the game's combat I don't think I want to keep delaying Hi-Fi Rush by too much longer just to wrap up the last two challenges the game has for me.

Spore

2024-03-27, 04:27 AM

I tried Dragon's Dogma 1 last night and god damn I now know why Dark Souls 1 is one of the best games of the genre (comparable release window) again. One is showered in exposition (Dark Souls has 1 minute of intro which is inconsequential) and tells its story through set pieces. DD has an intro sequence which is meant to hype up the game and explain basic functions, two long cutscenes and after that you are a nobody with a wooden sword a magic stick that shoots pitiful magic or an archer with an ugly ass bow. In the same time in Dark Souls 1 you are confronted with huge demon forcing you to flee, walk a small gauntlet, get a weapon, potions and are allowed to fight the same demon again, now on equal footing.

I dont know how Dragons Dogma 1 was such a hit. But I am pretty impatient.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-27, 06:20 AM

I dont know how Dragons Dogma 1 was such a hit. But I am pretty impatient.

Get up to the encampment, especially as a Strider, and it'll become clear. Plus the combat is pretty damn good once you've unlocked a few skills, comparatively Dark Souls characters feel like they don't know how to swing a sword.

Plus the setup of the Dragon is pretty damn amazing. Sure it's a couple of cutscenes, but there's just this moment where he stops acting as a rampaging beast and chooses your character and it's great.

The biggest downside to DD1 is that the gear treadmill can make switching classes on the fly night impossible. Oh sure you'd like to be an X but you need to cough up the cash for their weapons first, and then probably upgrade them. The second biggest is how you'll always romance a shopkeeper.

Cespenar

2024-03-27, 11:02 AM

I tried DD1 very recently, and unlike Dark Souls, the feeling I got was one of 2000s european RPGs, ironically. It's not a today's game, but back when it came out, it must have been fun.

Rynjin

2024-03-27, 03:15 PM

DD1 honestly kinda sucks right up until you get to Gran Soren, thus fully ending the tutorial segment. That's when you unlock the Advanced and Hybrid Vocations, get access to real shops, quests, etc.

Just remember once you get there: go BACK to Cassardis before proceeding with the main questline or you'll miss a critical plot quest chain.

Return home regularly.

Zevox

2024-03-27, 03:23 PM

Wel, beat those two Brutal Challenges I had left. Honestly, I was surprised by how much easier than the Cloud + Zack Legendary Challenge they wound up being, especially the last one, which is clearly intended to be the toughest challenge in the game.
The challenge's rounds go:
1) Phoenix & Kujata.
2) Titan & Bahamut Arisen.
3) Odin & Alexander.
4) Gilgamesh.
5) Sephiroth.

The summon duos do have less health and are easier to stagger than when they're on their own, but also unique mechanics, like when you fight them before the regular Gilgamesh fight. Gilgamesh starts with all of his weapons equipped, and is at full power. And Sephiroth has new moves entirely, including one where he binds anyone he hits with it until he either binds everyone (in which case he Octoslashes the group) or is staggered.

Despite all that, it only took me four tries to beat, and the first two were just me trying to pass the first fight with my default materia setup before deciding I needed to switch Cloud and Aerith to have fire immunity. So two tries in which I was actually getting anywhere rather than just feeling things out. That Zack challenge really forced me to master fighting the six summons, so once I had the fire immunity for Phoenix + Kujata they were easy; Gilgamesh was touch and go at times, but I never lost to him in the end; and Sephiroth I just needed to remember to have Barret cast Barrier on the group so I could survive if we got Octoslashed (though I managed to only have that happen once on the successful run, since I learned parrying his binding attack is actually fairly easy).

By all rights this should've been harder than the Zack challenge, because Gilgamesh and Sephiroth are both tougher fights than any in Zack's gauntlet. But I guess having a full team I get to select and equip is just that much better than only having Cloud and a pre-equipped Zack.
So yeah, I think that's finally the end with Rebirth for me. Damn good game despite my dislike of the open world elements, would likely be an easy GotY for me if it weren't for Persona 3 Reload. On to Hi-Fi Rush!

I dont know how Dragons Dogma 1 was such a hit. But I am pretty impatient.
"Hit" is not the word for it. Cult classic, more like. When it initially came out Capcom noted that it had sold well in Japan, but struggled in the west. But it sold better over the long haul due to positive word of mouth and the "Dark Arisen" expanded re-release a few years later.

Though personally, Dark Souls is one of the few games I'd compare Dragon's Dogma to positively on the storytelling front. Because at least DD makes sure you know what's going on and why in its world, which is more than I can say for Dark Souls.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-27, 09:04 PM

DD1 honestly kinda sucks right up until you get to Gran Soren, thus fully ending the tutorial segment. That's when you unlock the Advanced and Hybrid Vocations, get access to real shops, quests, etc.

I'd argue that it's about Level 20 that it stops sucking, when you'll finally have the free cash to switch to vocations with unique weapons (Magick Archer, Mystick Knight, Warrior, Ranger, and Sorcerer). In fact I suspect it's playthrough 2+ where you'll have multiple locations at different ranks that it really shines.

Anyway I accidentally got Mercedes killed in my playthrough, hoping when I come back from my break that I load far enough back for her to be alive.

Rynjin

2024-03-27, 10:48 PM

Anyway I accidentally got Mercedes killed in my playthrough, hoping when I come back from my break that I load far enough back for her to be alive.

I wouldn't sweat it too much, just save her on the next run.

Spore

2024-03-28, 06:39 AM

I'd argue that it's about Level 20 that it stops sucking

It isnt DD's fault, and I don't even know if Lv 20 is fast or not, but I am SICK AND TIRED of games that go "once you sunk 20 hours into it it gets good, I promise".

Because for one I dont have this kind of time anymore. For another, I cannot tell if it is sunk cost fallacy or actual enjoyment.

warty goblin

2024-03-28, 06:50 AM

It isnt DD's fault, and I don't even know if Lv 20 is fast or not, but I am SICK AND TIRED of games that go "once you sunk 20 hours into it it gets good, I promise".

Because for one I dont have this kind of time anymore. For another, I cannot tell if it is sunk cost fallacy or actual enjoyment.

I'd very much agree with this. If the game takes 20 hours to get to the good stuff, somebody somewhere screwed up because that's a lot of time to spend on a mediocre thing. I'm not demanding instant gratification here, it's fine for the beginning to be a bit slower paced to let new players get used to the controls and so on, but that's like 2 hours of lower key challenge and tutorials, tops. Not 20 hours.

Anonymouswizard

2024-03-28, 07:35 AM

It isnt DD's fault, and I don't even know if Lv 20 is fast or not, but I am SICK AND TIRED of games that go "once you sunk 20 hours into it it gets good, I promise".

Because for one I dont have this kind of time anymore. For another, I cannot tell if it is sunk cost fallacy or actual enjoyment.

So the issue in Dragon's Dogma is twofold:
-You begin with only two skills, which are the meat of the combat system. Not too bad, but the tutorial gives you a full set of six.
-Changing vocation does not give you a basic set of gear, discouraging changing into more fun ones until late into the same.

The first is the major cause of suck, but is a non-issue after a couple of hours. The second takes a long time to solve, especially if you're trying to work around Mage's low stat growth, but if you like the combat system shouldn't be a deal breaker.

DD2 apparently fixed the second issue by doing what the first should have done: make sure you have a basic version of every weapon so you can try out vocations without issue.

Rynjin

2024-03-28, 02:19 PM

It isnt DD's fault, and I don't even know if Lv 20 is fast or not, but I am SICK AND TIRED of games that go "once you sunk 20 hours into it it gets good, I promise".

Because for one I dont have this kind of time anymore. For another, I cannot tell if it is sunk cost fallacy or actual enjoyment.

Level 20 is pretty quick; the cap is 200.

Rodin

2024-03-28, 05:27 PM

Dragon's Dogma is a classic case of "first impressions matter". And those first impressions were enough to make me stop playing after (checks time played) 2.1 hours.

Finally getting my party and finding out they were mindless pawns was the first big hit, I'd say. Running around the overworld with my pawns shouting generic lines over and over killed any interest I might have had. I also remember the overworld being very underwhelming, just empty space with nothing interesting going on in it. Maybe that's just the opening zone, but I found it boring.

What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive] - Page 5 (2024)

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